when you just don’t know.

I know that God is good, I know that God is Love.  He has taken these children that I am surrounded by out of really horrible situations and given them an opportunity to learn about Him, to learn about Love.  To be healed of their pasts and grow strong towards the future.

But I also know that there are a lot of things that happen in life that God has not mandated, that God does not want to happen.  Sometimes He intervenes, and sometimes He doesn’t.  I don’t always understand, but I do not doubt His justice.

One of my little girls just left.  I didn’t want her to see me cry but when her mom started promising me that she was going to take good care of her I couldn’t stop the tears that fell.  Because I don’t know if that’s true.  I don’t know if she’ll be safe.  She wasn’t before.  I don’t know if this is what God wanted.

I’m writing to process what I’m feeling.  I’m so scared.  That’s what I feel.  I feel scared, I feel grief.  I already miss her which is crazy because my life is going to be so much easier without her here trying to manipulate me every day.  Now I’m laughing, this is good.  Ohhh I can’t believe I only have three.  I had nine when I got here.  Is this what it feels like when your kids go away to college?

Rosa Isela told me some ugly things about her life in her house and the family that she just left with, things that may have been true or may have been lies (I wasn’t kidding about the manipulative thing!) and I know the only thing I can do now is pray, and pray, and pray, and if you want to join that would be so good.

Last August, I was visiting and she was still “the new girl.”

 

white as snow/why not be vulnerable?

“THE AMERICANS ARE HERE!”

The time has arrived… no more of my girls asking me every single day ten times a day how many days were left until the Americans got here (We should have made a paper chain!)  because.. they’re here!

This orphanage is so very blessed to have the support of so so many people North of the border, and several times every year a large group of those supportive folk make their way to this humid jungle to visit the children they love so much.  That was how I met this place, how I met Mexico, even how I met Pentecostals!

I remember so well getting off the first airplane I’d ever been on and finding the massive group of Southerners dressed in the same T-shirt as I: all of us Poza Rica bound.  I was eighteen, I know I must have appeared young and excited and naive.  I was.  But I need to confess that underneath that burgundy T-shirt and that innocent smile was a very broken heart and a girl who was suffering the consequences of her own actions, sins she had committed against the heart of God.

It was these kids that the Lord used to start the healing of that very broken heart, it was these kids that made me wake up and realize that all the ways in which other people had hurt me and all of the ways in which I had screwed up weren’t important compared to what God wanted to do.  I’m not sure if I should say what God wanted to do in their lives or in my life.. because honestly, all I remember is that something shifted strongly inside my spirit, and my own suffering wasn’t important anymore compared to how crazy I was about those children.

I came back here in June, five months after that and the Lord continued the healing work that he had started in my heart that January.  I remember perfectly being in a little yellow church and being on my knees asking God to send his fire down, asking Him to “take it from me, take it from me” that burden, that heaviness, of the sin I carried.  It was so heavy, my mistakes, my regrets.  There I was on my hands and knees begging God for forgiveness, and He washed me white as snow.

My story is one that begins with a little girl whose heart is moved for the orphaned.  But when that little girl grew up and was given a choice of Jesus or a handsome young man she chose the handsome young man.  And that choice led her very far away from everything she had always desired to be.  Eventually.. she realized the gravity of that decision, and she suffered for it.  And she suffered, and she suffered, and she suffered.  It broke her, to know how she had broken the heart of her first Love, Jesus.

I’m trying to make you understand that when I think of myself and I think of my life I think of a girl who has done some really stupid things.  That I have spent the past 3 years seeing myself as the sinful woman in Luke 7 pouring out her perfume on the feet of Jesus and washing them with her tears.  I’m sorry Jesus, I’m sorry Jesus, I’m so so sorry.  And I’m trying to make you understand because only if you understand how broken I have been can you understand how beautiful it is for me that God has restored me.

I can’t stop thinking about the broken mess I was when I first walked onto this property because these past few days I’ve been reminded of how beautiful a woman I have become.  I love Him more than anything now.  I know the voice of my Father.  I obey His voice and my heart trusts and delights in my Maker.  My life has become an example of a woman after God’s own heart.  And I can’t stop questioning “How did this happen?”

Because my Grace is sufficient for you, He tells me.

I’m living my dream.  And it’s all because of Him, and it’s all for Him.  Everything that I have become, everything that He has shaped me into.. is because our God is good and gracious and His mercy is new every morning.  I cannot comprehend this mercy.  I cannot comprehend that He trusts me.  All I know is that He does, that I am forgiven, that I am a new creation.  That he has made what was unholy, Holy.

Awesome, if you ask me.

This verse is a promise God gave to me two years ago, a promise I think He has fulfilled.

“..And I will give you a new heart, with new and right desires, and I will put a new spirit in you.”  Ezekiel 36:26

January 2009 & July 2011