Outreach is a beautiful, lifegiving thing. Not in spite of that fact but contributing to it, there are some moments that bind me. They leave me almost numb with an inner empathetic pain. There are two moments in particular that just got to me, stuck through the night, lingered there, like a sort of tangible object too large and foreign to place or know what to do with. It's easy to read books, memorize statistics, and be able to recite in conversation the cold facts about this beautiful world that seems to have a preference for cruelty and despair. and then the moments happen, where it all becomes real and I find myself shell-shocked, gasping for air, wondering, "Why, God? Why does this have to be this way, and why am I so lucky to have avoided it?"
and then I remember the words that I've muttered to God with a sort of proud nobility: "Lord, teach me everything I need to know, so that I can be a part of the cure." And God shrugged, and said, "Ok. Fair enough. There's no going back, though." and with a naive grin, I pressed on.
The first moment happened one night in the market in Chiang Rai. We finished our shopping; I bought a few trinkets for people back home, but for the most part I just observe at these places - there's a lot you can learn about people in the concrete wilderness where money is king . There's a sort of spiritual queasiness about it all, though, because of what I know about what happens down the alleys in the backs of shops. The lust and suffering that floats into the air is practically sentinent. And then the moment, which was this: I look into a massage parlor and for a small moment my eyes meet with a girl, seemingly about my age. she's dressed in clothes that aren't too revealing, but imply she's there for business. and in that moment I see through her eyes into her soul. And it isn't evil, and it almost seems to not be suffering or joyful or any other sort of human emotion. Just deadness. The human spirit can only take so much slavery, so much pain, before it just gives up, takes it, becomes numb. Like the second it takes to swallow a pill, the moment passed, but like medicine it seemed to shake me in new ways as the night went on.
The next moment happened a few days ago. We went for a walk through one of the villages here in Issan, handing out literature, praying for the sick, playing with children. Those who can speak the dialect would talk to people, but I couldn't aside from greetings. We stopped at a house that drew my attention because of a large sideyard filled with green vegetables. In the courtyard there was a mat, and a young mother was keeping her three daughters occupied while her mom did laundry and her grandmother tilled the garden. It all seemed fairly uneventful, I held the littlest one, who was about a year old, while our sisters talked to the young mother. At one point the mother said something as I passed the baby off to stephanie. As stephanie took the baby, the little one started wailing, and I didn't know if it was the handoff or what the mother said. It was only when we had left and one of our sisters told me what she had said that I was blindsighted: They had been talking about how in the past year her husband had died in an auto accident, and when a couple of pharong came so unexpectedly and seemed so taken by her, she wondered aloud at the idea that I should take her youngest child, in hopes that I could give it a better life than she could. There's really nothing in life that could prepare you for that moment, I don't think, because it's just so humbling, so painful, so real. These aren't statistics in a book, they're people. Lovely, precious people. People that God created.
And this is why we fight, why we give up our own ideas of how to spend our lives and we give up our comfortable western homes and all the money we could be using to have fun, and tell God that we'll give everything; because what we're fighting for is precious.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
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