Dallas

Somewhere in the airspace over Dallas is where I lose it.

I’m not sure what it is. I do okay in Fort Lauderdale. In Florida everyone is coming and going from the Caribbean and the people are so diverse and I’m still feeling excited about being back in America after three months.

But heading into Dallas is different. Suddenly everyone around me looks like a middle-class American soccer mom or business man. And even though I’m elbow-wrestling with the next person for two inches of arm rest real estate, I suddenly feel miles away from everyone else. And I sit there simultaneously hoping to stay lost in my thoughts without a word spoken to me so I can cling to every memory, and needing to tell someone everything I just saw and did to make it seem more real and less like a dream. But these people are miles away from me. They could never understand the things I walked through, not even the matching-shirted short-term mission team that was on the flight from Haiti. They have no idea. These people who look like my next-door neighbors are aliens to me.

I think Dallas is where my brain feels the split- two worlds that don’t reconcile. Dallas is where I start to feel like it was all a dream. Because if the kid with the iPad and the Starbucks every twenty feet and the immaculate climate-controlled building are all real, how can my malnourished babies and hurting mamas and dusty streets be real too?? It seems like they can’t possibly both be real. And that’s when the tears just come. Even though I was kissing those babies only hours ago, I feel like I’m losing them into that hazy dream-stuff already. And it scares me. Because the memories of those kids are more valuable to me than anything else in this world. I’m trying so hard to hold them tightly and it feels like they are just falling through my fingers.

And to the next person I just look like any other young American with a nice summer tan. They can’t see the frenzy inside as I cling to my treasures- the faces of babies we lost, and of kids that lived, the grief and joy and love defined by those faces. I’m a Texan girl back in Texas, but feeling like a stranger in a strange land.

It’s been a few days. I’m settling into that uncomfortable feeling. The tension of living with this irreconcilable reality. Re-learning how to live with a heart that is divided between two worlds. I’m feeling grateful for the Savior who spans the distance, who is rock-solid and sure in both places. Because if I know nothing else, I know that He is good, He is love, and He is real. Even in Dallas. 

Stained

Some days it’s hard not to give up on people. Not just some people, all of humanity really. It’s hard when my kiddos die of diseases and traumatic accidents and the like, but when the malicious, intentionally evil things seem to keep ruling this place, sometimes you just want to curl up in a ball and ugly-cry your face off. I know, I’ve done it. When yet another gunshot victim, or head-bashed-in-with-a-rock victim, or repeated-stabbing-with-broken-bottles victim comes in.

For me it’s yet another hydrocephalus baby abandoned at the hospital, or even worse, the days-old, spina bifida baby that was brought to us after being found in a dumpster. In the trash. The baby was thrown in the trash. She was thrown away. She’s doing okay now- cleaned up, eating, getting antibiotics and wound care for the lesions covering her body. But thinking about the evil this baby has endured thus far in her little life, it seems too crushing, like an elephant on my chest. Like I said, it’s hard not to give up on people. We’re so ugly and hurtful and hateful, bent and broken and stained by sin, capable of such unspeakable evil.

This is when I really cannot wrap my mind around God’s love. Because sometimes I think He should just squish us. We deserve it. We deserve to be squished. All of us. Especially by Him. Because really even those of us that look okay on the outside, with the manicured lawn and washed windows, on the inside we’re stained too. The selfishness and hatred that lurks in my heart is as dark as baby-trashing. That’s what is really crushing. And He sees it all, even the stains in me that I don’t even know about. He knows them. He sees yours too. We’re all baby-trashers.

“When the time was right, the Anointed One died for all of us who were far from God, powerless, and weak. Now it is rare to find someone willing to die for an upright person, although it’s possible that someone may give up his life for one who is truly good. But think about this: while we were wasting our lives in sin, God revealed His powerful love to us in a tangible display—the Anointed One died for us. As a result, the blood of Jesus has made us right with God now, and certainly we will be rescued by Him from God’s wrath in the future. If we were in the heat of combat with God when His Son reconciled us by laying down His life, then how much more will we be saved by Jesus’ resurrection life? In fact, we stand now reconciled and at peace with God. That’s why we celebrate in God through our Lord Jesus, the Anointed.” Romans 6:6-11

What the what?! Seriously? I have heard the Gospel since I was knee-high to a grasshopper (obviously an expression; I was knee-high to a Harlem Globetrotter by the time I could stand), but it knocks me on my face over and over again. How God could possibly look down on all this mess and not squish us- to still want us and love us and die for us, enduring all of our darkness, so that our stains might be washed clean. To call us not Despised or Evil, but Beloved. It amazes me sometimes the work that God has done in me, to have taken my capacity to love others from thimble-sized to teacup-sized, a work He continues every day despite my failing. But His Love? His Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreakable, Always and Forever Love? I think the song “The Love of God” describes it my favorite way:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky

So I guess I’m not going to give up on humanity today. I’m going to dry my eyes and thank my God and keep loving those despicable people. How could I not? He didn’t give up on me.