I wish that I could tell you...

I have regretted more than once how little I’ve written here about my time in India. I could give a number of reasons, like inconsistent internet, slow computers, or the time I washed my flash drive in a bucket with my dirty laundry. But beyond all of these things I am grappling with thoughts and emotions, experiences and memories that are too close to the heart to reveal to you fully. I’m fearful, perhaps, that if I told you what I wish I could that it would be too heavy a burden for you to bear. Because I’m not certain you want to hear it, or what you would do with the knowledge that I now carry.

How can I explain to you the things that confront me daily? Like the time that one of the women here, who was rescued from sex trafficking by IJM, asked me to teach her to read and she picked up the book in front of me, which happend to be Good News About Injustice. Or how about one of our boys, who has half the local town rallied against him because they learned he is HIV positive and they don’t want him in school with their children. Or the signs of abuse I discover on the bodies of children when I apply scabies lotion. How can I explain the chills that run over my body when a child tells me the horrors of living on a railway platform? Or a child, who in the delirium of typhoid fever, calls out all night long for the mother she lost long ago. Or a boy who was infected with HIV by the blood transfusion that saved his life when he was a baby. Or the confusion on a child’s face when he asks, “how long do I have to take this medicine?” and I answer. “For the rest of your life.”

How can I share the intense faith of children who have faced every kind of evil, yet trust in Jesus with their whole beings? Who pray desperately for rain in the midst of a drought, and God sends rain? What words do I have to tell about the love that God gives me daily, which reaches far beyond my own capacity to love?

Its not that I have nothing to write about, its that I just can’t find the words…