This Difficult Lens (My Brother's Keeper)

This difficult lens is the one I'm looking through. It won't necessarily make you more comfortable, more hopeful, more sure - this raw glimpse at the wrestlings in me - but I don't believe it is for nothing. I don't believe this wrestling is fruitless or hopeless even if at this moment it causes hurt or a struggle. Lean in with me, if you will take a moment to try, to put on this lens I am still trying to understand myself:

There are bombs falling in Syria. I read the truth of it late one night, illuminated with a million other everyday stories on social media and yet it screamed out to me, hit me hard. War is currently worse than it's ever been in this torn-up place and my heart aches because I have seen what a war torn place can be left to face. The tears well up hot.

The world keeps spinning and the warmth of my coffee is stark against the scene outside the window, passersby all bundled as March announces itself boldly, in like a lion. And the whole thing seems like a joke; how in the quiet of snowfall and the clamor of a coffee shop - and a disorienting constant silent screaming as my nation's loudest voices seem to be always now asking Am I my brother's keeper? - how there are bombs falling and parents dying and tiny bellies swallowing cardboard for dinner in Syria. My mind drifts.

A few nights ago my husband and I ventured (for the millionth time? must be!) up those now familiar narrow stars into a small home we should never really feel at home in, to share what shouldn't really belong to us with friends who shouldn't really call us family - but they do - and we are. We sat in a crowded room, ignoring the TV, eating foreign-to-us food off a beautiful setup on the floor with laughter and teasing and joy and three families feeling like they belong. This safe space that so often forces us into new territory holds hearts that carry mine around as if we've always crammed into this drafty apartment and shared broken english and coloring book pages - and nearly every week I look at these beautiful faces and wonder How did we get here?

I remember.

...

I remember that chilly December day, over a year ago now, discovering this staircase for the first time. Up, up, to an unfamiliar family room where we had no idea who we'd meet. We knew one name - the woman of the house (a title so befitting, deeper than we could have known then), who wanted to know English better. We knew they were from Afghanistan, displaced to eventually be resettled twenty minutes from our home, and she had relatives. I hoped for kids to play with.

I remember meeting S, bright and bold and kind; so helpful, and hopeful, welcoming us immediately as her mother and aunt brought in treat after treat before we could even speak. I remember quiet little Z, wrapped in a blanket peering out behind her mother, hardly brave enough to dare offering a smile, and her sister F literally only willing to peek once from around a corner before ducking back out of sight. I remember spelling each name carefully on a scrap of paper, an effort to remember this new family: a mom, dad, aunt, and three daughters, one a set of twins. I remember the thrill of writing the alphabet together before we left, and beaming as Pete and I chatted wildly in the car on the ride home, so excited. What would this become? We had no idea. If we had only known!

If we had only known then how shy smiles would so quickly give way to huge hugs and belly laughs, nail painting, raw stories, huge parties, late nights, and oh so much learning together. If we had only known weekly lessons would grow into shared meals, always tea, homework help, shopping trips, fashion shows, movie nights, cooking lessons, awkward moments, ice skating, walks to the park, and tag playing. If we could have imagined the bridges to be built as our families met and carved out memories with this new family (quickly becoming our third family) or how they'd insist on calling us "sister," "brother," "aunt," "uncle." If we only knew how our pantry, our habits, our bookshelves, our priorities, our prayers, our thoughts, our hearts, our entires lives were about to change... we probably would have stayed longer that morning!

...

Sitting around this Afghan meal, filled with lamb, rice, chicken, and veggies, talking sports and future, laughing and joking about the size of our appetites compared to our waistbands, feeling so at ease in a situation which may have once seemed like stepping into another world - we have found ourselves a home here, embracing the unfamiliar. We find ourselves having been given the most incredible gifts in knowing this broader definition of family and the world and loving our neighbor.

I looked into little eight year old faces squeezed in beside me, and this growing thirteen year old girl who is going to change the world. They choose random moments each visit to surprise us with reminders that we're cared for. I try to do the same, because I feel it with all of me. I wonder if they notice how often I stare at their faces and literally whisper a silent Thank You to God - for keeping them safe - for bringing them here alive and together and so whole that we might know them and love them. At dinner Z insisted that I save (or really, protect) the spot next to me. She chatted about how she has my back if I got full and advised me not to clear my plate too early or they would try to fill it up again so fast but don't worry she would grab it right away and run! Meanwhile F reassured me that I should eat up so that I grow muscles and get strong, her mom just doesn't want me to be too skinny. This family who looks out for us, who surprises us with hugs and unassuming affection when we most need it and least expect it - "Miss Katie, I just really like you a lot. Like you are my own Aunt" - they have captured my heart. They remind me the beautiful simplicities woven into childhood, and every once in a while the complexities of the country and past they love but had to flee.

And it is their precious faces I see - flashing through my mind with the thought each day for the past few weeks - as there are bombs falling in Syria. Because there are families in the path of war right now - children who laugh like sweet Z and F and have dreams like wise S. There are strong, smart, brave and incredible parents like this family dying, devastated, starving. How do I move forward moment by deceivingly calm moment? How do I not? What can I even do?

What do you do with yourself when every face of every person facing or fleeing war, pain, and poverty begins to look human to you - familiar to you? Each story is unique and individual, each background and culture will vary in its striking and stunning diversity - but each person represents the same thing: an image-bearer. Distinctly and intrinsically valued by God and therefore by me - by us - as fellow humans. I am my brother's, my sister's keeper. The pages of God's Word breathed to life leave no room for doubt: I exist to lay my life down, in the breathtaking example of Jesus life, this God-Man I call Savior who lived to be poured out and fully given away. And so my heart breaks the same as if these faces on twitter feeds and news articles are not just familiar, but family. Tears fall at the images scrolling because I see pieces of ourselves suffering where ever there is suffering. We are not separate, we belong to each other.

The weight of it hangs heavy and I cannot, will not, turn away. I have no real answers but my Father holds it all so I know where to turn with my weeping heart and this difficult lens He is giving me. I can do small things. And if I have to keep walking around leaking for a while (or even until all things are made new?), I will. Because I believe in not shying away when it hurts. Because God chose to step into my brokenness so I can step into broken places with my brave broken heart. Because there are girls who need to know they are worthy of self-sacrificing love in Sierra Leone, and there are refugees who I hope hear: you are wanted here when they arrive in Buffalo, and there are bombs falling in Syria. Today.

And it matters to me.

Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth [citizenship] of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Ephesians 2:12-13

Incredible/Reputable places to get involved in big and small ways, today:

Journey's End Refugee Services (Buffalo)

Jericho Road Community Health Center (Buffalo)

WEDI Westminster Economic Development Initiative (Buffalo)

West Side Bazaar (Buffalo)

Let Them LOL Volunteer Center (Buffalo/Sierra Leone)

Preemptive Love Coalition (Syria/Iraq/US)

The White Helmets (Syria)

The Weight of Two Worlds

A version of me wrote this in 2015 after returning from an incredible trip to Sierra Leone, my third, while navigating the sea of emotion and internal whirlwind that surely follows. In reading this back years later I am a little taken aback at how raw it all still feels, how it all still lies there right below surface in my heart, yet it is somehow healing to relive. I'm not sure if it will mean anything to you, friend, but here is a glimpse; for what it's worth:

I am back and I am trying. But if I am quiet, slow to respond, suddenly distant, forgive me - I am slowly unpacking two realities that seem so impossibly different. Each day there are moments my spirit aches and I wonder Where am I? Where is 'home' when everything is equally familiar and foreign? My friend calls it the place in between and I couldn’t say it better. Lately, I feel like a stranger, awkwardly trying to bear the weight of two worlds I barely understand.

I sit at my kitchen table and wonder at the silence of my parents' impossibly daunting house, still listening for the sea of tiny mende voices singing to their Jesus or erupting into laughter at every corner. I wander my neighborhood and try to reconcile what I see against the mud huts and red dirt floors still lingering behind close eyelids. I close my eyes in my soft bed as a song plays that once held back floodgates in a place where hope is something you fight for, sometimes moment by moment. I stare at the TV and wonder at our desperate pursuit and investment in personal happiness, when I have so recently held hands with a community united by self-sacrifice who has faced darkness with a resilience and a love for peace that outshines 'happy.' I swallow back the lump in my throat as I fill my cup from the tap, recalling the shy smile of the girl in red, standing in front of a murky dragonfly-infested ditch that is all the water for an entire village today. Friends ask kindly, some interested, some just being polite, "How was your trip?" and all I can muster is "It was... a lot."

Sometimes I want to run, and I have to wonder: Jesus, did You cry too at the awkward heavy tension, the pull and the burden between two worlds You adore? Did You long for Your home in heaven when You entered this world, did You miss the wonder and closeness of Your creation when You left it? Did Your bones grow weary with an ache to expose another world as we continually ran toward darkness, missed the point, hurt each other, ignored what mattered most? Do Your feet miss walking with us on red earth?

Today, pages of my favorite book still smell like another world. It sounds goofy but I'm completely serious! Chapters left open to the thinning air of distant heat lightning and heavy jungle rain, words brushed with red dusty fingerprints, love letters stained and rippling from my divided, leaky heart have trapped in their pages the distinct ozone of a beloved broken place. A place I love, 4,500 miles from here... and I am afraid to lose the smell. I know I can't but I am desperately trying to trap it there forever. I don't want to forget.

Greater than the fear of losing a scent, deep in me there is a growing fear of watching truths and memories fade away into this odd world I grew up in - into the busyness of the familiar, the easy, the convenient, the American dream I have so long accepted as 'normal'. I don't want to lose this passion to distance, I don't want to give up this urgency to the changing of seasons, I want to keep each uncomfortable detail vivid at the surface because I don't want to lose who I am becoming - who my Father is making me - in the hurt and the messy hope of it all.

I didn't know what God had in store for us this year in Sierra Leone. I didn't know He would expose greater darkness than I have known there in the past, that amidst slow progress and setbacks we would have to fight for hope again and again. I didn't know I would see the heart of my Father in the deep tear-stained rest of a little girl snuggling into my lap, I didn't know how impossible it would be to find a pair of shoes to protect her very small bandaged foot. I didn't know I would glimpse heaven in a long-awaited embrace with one teenage girl who somehow sings as she speaks, who is finally going to school, who calls us best friends, who can finally write her name. I didn't know my Savior would invite me to wash the tiny feet of a broken heart just like mine, being slowly restored, washed clean, and re-named in a sea of profound relentless grace. Do you remember that Man, Jesus? He has washed you clean! I whispered desperately to us both, reaching with all my heart into the painful silence of those heavy eyes. What hurt do those eyes hide, little one? I didn't know He would lead me back to the edge of murky mud puddles in villages I visited one year ago, still waiting for clean water. In the course of a year you tell yourself it must be better now but I didn't know it's not yet. I didn't know I would stare into a wide smile, a scratchy giggle and realize I have so much to learn about joy from the delicate frame of one of my favorite little girls in the universe. I didn't know we'd get to witness hope opening wide the heart of a little boy whose scars seem unfathomable. I didn't know how much I continue to underestimate what hope and family and grace can do to re-write a predictable ending into a symphony of freedom in four short years and eighteen children.  I didn't know my heart had more room to hold such polar opposite emotions moment by moment in a jungle where a battle rages - love and anger, desperate hope and searing pain, quiet adoration and tearful despair. I didn't know what new depths He'd hidden a world away and I still don't know what He has planned.

But I know more than I did. I am learning to know the Man of Sorrows the ancients spoke of, the One who endured the full consequence of sin for a greater promise to His children - each and every one of us. I am learning to see Him in every detail of this place. He is here, in the heavy suffering and resilient joy of each fragile frame, for He knows their suffering, in the deepest darkness He has not left their side. I am learning to know the One who walked this earth carrying the full weight of two worlds. That Man is with them in a way I have yet to grasp, and that Man is leading me. Into this dark place He will surely come. I don't want to forget. 

He meets me here. He brings spring rains, a long awaited promise, truths yet unspoken in a well watered place. He stoops down to wash dirty feet, and His steady love draws us in to know Him deeper for He is there in every fear, every scar. He will teach my heart to patiently know a world I can call home - an already/not-yet Kingdom whose burden is Light. He is coming again to bind up the broken and I am just trying to follow, leaning in for His whisper.

So forgive me for where I am, clinging desperately to the discomfort that haunts me. I am trying to hold on, to remember, to be near to the Man of Sorrows. I want to keep each uncomfortable detail vivid at the surface because I don't want to lose who I am becoming - who my Father is making me - in the hurt and the messy hope of it all. I am staring out the window, scanning for jungles of palm trees, I am closing my eyes trying still to breathe in red dirt. I am feeling for someone's gentle hand in mine, I am replaying that squeaky smiling voice calling Kadijah! I am trying not to cry at piles of food stocking restaurants and grocery stores, I am standing in the hot shower grieving muddy water holes being used to sustain life. I am searching for a Man who understands the tension better than I, because I need to know Him in this place. I am awkwardly carrying two worlds, as this Man of Sorrows pulls back each finger, fills my empty stained hands with His, and leads me forward. He is my home and even here - where I don't yet understand Him - into this place, too, He will surely come.

“Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh? If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday.The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail." - Isa 58:6-7, 10-11

Gala 2015 - Someone Like Me from letthemLOL on Vimeo.