From Satanist to Pastor

"I was a Satanist.  They tried to lynch me."  That was how Ezequiel began his story.  I have to admit that he caught my attention with that; after all, he had been one of my quietest, sweetest seminary students.  I never would have guessed his background. 

We had arrived in his hometown of San Sebastian Coatan, a gorgeous little community way up in the Cuchumatanes Mountains where the clouds never completely lift.  He and his friend Luis, another one of my students, were giving Linda and me the grand tour of their village.  It didn't take long.  At the end, they took us up to see a Mayan altar at the very top of an enormous gorge.  Ezequiel and I wandered over to the edge and just stared at the expanse of rippled mountains in front of us.  After a while, he started talking. 

"I was a Satanist.  They tried to lynch me."  And he went on to tell me what a rough childhood he'd had.  His father had fought in Guatemala's Civil War, during the course of which he'd killed well over 20 people.  That takes a toll on a man.  He started drinking and taking his rage out on his wife and kids.  Ezequiel was so angry with his father and so desperate to protect his mother that he was willing to do anything.  He'd heard that Satan was powerful and wanted to see that power for himself, so he joined a small group of other young people, and together they set out to worship the devil.  One afternoon they went out to the pinnacle of a jagged, oval shaped boulder embedded in the side of the cliff to perform some rituals.  Ezequiel pointed out the spot to me as he talked. "One of my friends fell to his death right in front of me that day," he said. When the villagers heard what had happened, they blamed Ezequiel just because he had been there.  They grabbed him, tore his clothes, and beat him.  This is the beginning of the lynching process here.  Once the victim (or perpetrator as the case may be) has been beaten to the point that they are unable to fight back, they are doused with gasoline and burned alive.  Fortunately, the crowd did not get that far with Ezequiel.  The police showed up, pulled him from the middle of the mob, and took him to jail.  There is no such thing here as "innocent until proven guilty."  Ezequiel spent quite a bit of time incarcerated. 

"It was there that the devil marked me.  Want to see the scar?"  He lifted his shirt to reveal a series of slashes on his mid back.  "Satan came to me while I was sleeping and attacked me with claws like razors. It was then that I decided I didn't want anything more to do with Satan, and I gave my life to Christ."  When Ezequiel got out of jail, he immediately set out to learn more about God's Word.  He figured the best place to do that was in seminary, so he did some research and found Instituto Biblico Berea.  In order to get in, he needed to be a baptized believer with a letter of reference from a church, so he found a Christian church and asked the pastor to baptize him and give him a letter.  Thank God this pastor was a discerning man and took a chance on him! He was baptized immediately because that's the biblical model: "Get saved, get baptized," the pastor said, and then he wrote Ezequiel a letter of reference so he could apply.  I would love to meet that pastor someday and shake his hand!

This is how Ezequiel ended up in my classroom studying the book of Romans two weeks ago.  It gave me goosebumps when he looked at me and said, "It really made an impact on me when you taught us about the doctrine of imputation...how God not only wipes our slates clean, but He gives us all the righteousness of Christ.  What a gift!"  It still gives me shivers just to write it out. To me, the doctrine of imputation is one of the most amazing things in the whole Bible, and not only did I receive Christ's righteousness myself, but now I get to teach others about it!

After five years of study, Ezequiel will graduate next month.  I am so incredibly proud of how far he's come!  He is already pastoring in the jungle, six hours away from his hometown.  I asked him if he liked the heat of the jungle, especially after having grown up in a cool mountain climate. He answered, "I don't really like the heat, but I told God to use me however He sees fit.  I will go anywhere He sends me." 

Several of these Mayan altars have been erected in the area as a direct result what happened with Ezequiel and his friends that fateful day.  The villagers perform yearly rituals to the gods to ask for their blessing and protection from harm.  How very sad that they are literally asking the devil to protect them from the devil, and they don't even realize it. 

A Way Out

Imagine you are a 9 year old girl living with your paternal grandparents, your big sister, your dad, and your mom who is several months pregnant with your little brother.  Life is good.  You are happy.  One day your dad gets a bad headache and goes to lay down.  The headache never goes away, but your family has no money to take him to the doctor.  Less than 2 weeks later, he dies.  As is customary, you leave your paternal grandparent’s home to move in with your mom’s parents.  This other grandfather is not loving and kind; he is strict and mean, sometimes beating you over trivial things.  You try your best to stay out of his way; that’s easier since you’re in school.  Eventually you finish 6^th grade though and you know no one has the money for you to keep studying.  Then a miracle happens—a lady your mom knows offers to pay for you to finish school!  It’s a FULL scholarship—she’ll even give you money so you don’t have to skip lunch!  You are so happy you can’t contain your huge smile!  But it doesn’t take long for it to all fall apart. Grandpa says no.  “There’s no point in educating a girl,” he says.  “Your only job in life is to marry, have children, and take care of your family.  In the meantime, you can keep my cornfields clean.” You are angry.  It’s so unfair!  You plead with your mom to change his mind, but she’s just as stuck as you are.  Without grandpa’s help and home, you would have nowhere to go.  You cannot defy him, so you are forced to turn the scholarship down.  Life goes on. 

Then it gets worse.  

You leave to work the coffee plantations with your mom, earning next to nothing.  One day you and mom hop out of the bed of the pick-up you were riding in, thinking it was safe to do so, that the truck was in park.  It was not, and it rolls backwards and over your mom.  Fortunately, mom escapes with only some bruises and nightmares.  Everything goes back to normal, except that you now realize how close you came to losing your mother too.  What would become of you if that happened?  You feel trapped.  Held back by your grandfather. Scared of losing your only remaining parent.  You can see the writing on the wall.  You will end up chained to a life of poverty and servitude that you didn’t choose because that’s just what happens to girls where you live.  The anxiety wells up inside you; you have no release.  But anxiety will always find a way out, and it gets you during the night when you least expect it.  You grind your teeth SO hard while you sleep that you wake up swollen and with a pounding headache. You are unaware that you do this during the night, so you don’t understand why you feel so bad every morning.  Maybe you’ll die from this headache just like your father did.  How is it that your life just continues to get worse?  You are in prison, and there is no.   way.   out. 

I wish this was just a poorly written piece of sad fiction, but the fact of the matter is that this is Silvia’s life.  I recently took her to a neurologist thinking she had something horrible; her head was very visibly misshapen.  Bite hard while your hand is on your temple.  Feel that muscle move? Silvia has been biting and grinding her teeth so hard in the night that her muscle had grown just like your biceps would if you worked out every day.  Obviously we are relieved that the situation wasn’t life-threatening, but the only way I can see to fix this—really fix it—is to offer this family some hope by getting them out from underneath grandpa’s rule and into their own place. If that happened,  I could put Silvia in the scholarship program so she’d have some chance at a future.  Mom could work and NOT have to turn over every cent to her father.  They could begin to dig themselves out of this depressing hole they’ve been forced to live in.  

If you’d like to help me bless this family with a simple, one-room home that has actual beds and a vented stove, visit www.cten.org/lynnannmurphy and click on the donate button.  This type of home only takes a couple of weeks to build, and I’d love to be able to get it done before school starts up again in January.  Wanna help me?

Just Be There

Sunday did not turn out like I planned.  Bible in hand, I was just about to walk out the door for church when Olga called crying, panicky, and difficult to understand.  She said she'd fallen the day before and hurt her foot--that it was still bleeding despite her best efforts to stop it.  The last time Olga called me in a panic, her 5 year old son, Donis, was dying because his skull had been crushed by a falling boulder.  Although he's perfectly fine now, that is the kind of incident that tends to stick with you, so when she called me in a panic this time, I flew out the door, convinced that she was bleeding to death and her foot was dangling by a thread.  You can imagine my relief when I arrived and saw the injury.  I cleaned it, put some antibacterial cream on it, and pulled it closed with two band-aids while Donis sat next to me shining the light from my cell phone on it while I worked. I prayed for Olga, promised to come back to check on her another time,  and then visited a few more people since I'd missed church and was out there anyway.

When I got back home, Jessie asked me how it went so I showed her this picture.  "She called you all the way out there for that?"  Then she paused while she thought about it.  " I guess that's kind of nice.  She trusts you.  You're the Boo-Boo Fixer. The one who puts on the band-aids." And it was nice; I loved that Olga called me when she didn't know what to do.

Estela's son, Franklin. Photo added

just because he's so darn cute

I wasn't always that way.  In fact, I remember a time long ago when Estela called me screaming that her grandmother was dying and probably wouldn't even make it until I could get there but would I please come and HURRY because they needed me and, and, and...So I dropped what I was doing and drove out there like a maniac only to pull up to the house and see grandma outside playing with the grandkids. Estela explained that grandma had been in the latrine a long time with severe diarrhea and cramps, but that she was fine now. I ended up giving them a pill for parasites, bringing grandma back from the very brink of death. 🙄 Believe me, I did a LOT of eye rolling over that once I got back home.

Since that time though, God has been teaching me a lot about how to be a better ambassador. God the Father could have thought up any number of ways to save us, but He sent His Son to come right down and sit in our mess with us.  He modeled for us what it looks like to just be there. He is not an aloof God; He is our ever present help. This morning I was reading I Thessalonians 2 a bit and saw where Paul modeled the same thing.  He said, "we were gentle with you, like a nursing mother with her own children...we shared with you not only the gospel of God but our own selves." You can't share yourself if you're not there. This is "How To Be a Good Missionary 101" (or parent, friend, sibling, teacher...).

Share the gospel.

Be there.

I'm preaching to myself as I know I will spend a good bit of today waiting in a doctor's office with one of the widows who tends to annoy me.  I will be tempted to be there physically while I am mentally and emotionally a million miles away.  God, help me to not do that.  Help me to truly give her my focused attention and treat her as You would.  Help us all to learn to be more present for one another.

Behold

A while ago I wrote a blogpost about what it's like to be a missionary in a place where violence, corruption, and extreme poverty converge.  I tried to describe the constant heaviness that missionaries feel in dealing with all of that on a daily basis while trying to decide who to help, how to help, how long to help, how much to help...I'm going to copy part of the last paragraph here as context to the rest of this post. 

"It used to be that when I pondered the bigness of God I thought about creation…how He holds the whole universe in His hand and keeps it running. That's a pretty big Person, but I can almost wrap my head around that.  What I can't fathom these days is Someone SO big that He can hold all the hurts and all the trauma of everyone in the whole world.  Lately I see one pitiful street dog and am completely undone.  It's a rough place to be in since they're everywhere around here.  I saw one the other day while I was driving--the same day I met baby Kevin--and I got mad. The combination of emaciated, dying child and emaciated, dying dog on the same day just pushed me over the edge. I yelled at God in the car, “How am I supposed to carry all of this?  It’s too heavy!”  And He said, “I never asked you to.”   I have been thinking about that for a couple weeks now.  It rings in my head.  “I don’t have to carry this.  He’s not asking me to.”  But I’m not sure how to put it down. 

That post was hard for me to write so afterwards I went for a drive to clear my head.  Would you believe that I saw a dog get hit in front of me TWICE before I even made it out of the city?  Needless to say, the drive was not cathartic.  I was already feeling pretty fragile, and seeing the dog get killed was the straw that broke the camel's back.  I was angry...angry at the way animals are treated in this country...at the stupid driver in front of me who saw the dog and didn't even bother to slow down...at the whole world in general because we're just awful and do such rotten things to each other...at God because...wait, what?  

When I realized that I was angry at God, I decided to talk to Him about it.  "God, I think I'm mad at You.   I know You're perfectly just, and I have no right to be.  I don't want to be...but I am.  This world is just so AWFUL!  How long are You going to let this go on before You come back?  How can You stand it? Mom always says "this too shall pass,"  but I think she was wrong on this one.  This isn't passing; in fact, it's getting worse! The murders, kidnappings, rapes...the corruption, the poverty, the injustice...it just keeps coming and coming and coming.   It's endless, and it's in my face every single day.   It is definitely NOT 'passing.'"  It took me a while to finish my rant. I'm surprised that God did not interrupt me with lightning or fireballs from heaven.  I did eventually run out of steam and just sat there brooding quietly. 

The Bible says that one of the Holy Spirit's jobs is to bring the truth of Scripture to mind when we need to hear it.  That afternoon I really needed to hear it.   This is the scripture He brought to my mind: "The world IS passing away.  Behold, I am making all things new."  I knew the first sentence was I John 2:17 and the second part was from Revelation somewhere, but I was unsure exactly which chapter so I looked it up.  It's Revelation 21.  Here it is in context:  "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain:  for the former things are passed away.  And He who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I am making all things new."   It was an eye-opening moment for me.  

Behold... LOOK UP...pay attention!  It is used 1298 times in the Bible.  I'm not sure how many of those times it is used in the imperative form--as a command--but I did read all the verses in the New Testament where Jesus himself used the word as a command.  These are some of the things we are told to behold.  They are comforting to me.  Maybe they will be to you too.  Behold:

We are not alone. 

"Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us." 

We are being cared for.  

"Behold the fowls of the air:  for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.  Are you not much better than they?"

Our enemy is fierce, but our Commander in Chief has our back.  

"And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat:  but I have prayed for you, that your faith fail not."  

This is not the end.  

"Behold, I am making all things new."

He's coming for us.  

"Behold, I come quickly." 

The Way You Do The Things You Do

I have had quite a few people question a decision I recently made, and I would like to offer an explanation. I think it will help all of us be a bit more understanding of one another.  What comes to mind when you hear the word culture?  If you're like most, you think of differences in language, dress, food, and maybe holidays or festivals.  While those are certainly obvious differences, culture encompasses SO much more than that.  Culture also includes things like:

• gender roles
• the concepts of personal space, time, cleanliness, or modesty
• what is considered funny
• attitude towards authority, school, or foreigners
• gestures and body language
• ideals of beauty 
• manners and appropriate social behavior
• childbearing and child rearing practices
• assumptions/what goes without saying

...and a whole HOST of other things that would probably never flicker across your brainwaves unless you were plunked inside another culture and found yourself floundering to try to understand what is normal to everyone else. 

It is very easy for us to make judgments about other people without taking into consideration this thing called culture.   Those of us who live and work in a culture outside our own often feel judged by both cultures instead of feeling included by both. Living in Guatemala has changed the way I see the world.  What used to be normal behavior to me--American behavior--is not normal to me anymore.  That's not to say that all Guatemalan behavior is normal to me, because that isn't the case either. I've been here almost 9 years now, and there are still a lot of things I don't know or understand about Guatemalan culture.  So I'm somewhat stuck in the middle of the two different ways of thinking.  Out of that middle ground is where I made the decision to take Olivia to her new home the other day.  

Remember Olivia?  She is the 33 year old widow who was in Loving InDeed and recently left her 6 children with their paternal grandparents in order to marry a 20 year old "man" and move over 3 hours away with him.  Many of you questioned my judgment (some of you pretty forcefully) when I drove the new couple to their home, believing that to be a show of support on my part.  Before I mention how culture played a part in that decision, let me just say that Olivia knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I was in total disagreement with her choice to leave her kids and remarry.  We had had many very frank discussions about it prior to the event.  So then why did I do it?  For one, I felt like it was important that someone on her side knew where she was in the case of emergency (one involving her or one involving her kids).  Google maps does not work in the mountains of Huehuetenango.  People who live off dirt roads in the mountains don't even have addresses.  If I hadn't taken them home, I would have had absolutely no idea how to ever find her again if the need arose.  But that's not the only reason.  There are cultural things that make Olivia's decision to leave her children a little more understandable and a little less horrible.  I am NOT saying her decision was the right one; I am only saying that I can understand how she made it.  

• In indigenous culture, it is not uncommon for a young widow to remarry and leave her kids to be raised by their grandparents.  Most men do not want to be burdened with caring for another man's children; most young women see marriage as the only way to protect themselves and get by in life.  Remember that this is a very macho culture.  Women are nothing more than property and have little to no rights in indigenous areas, regardless of what the "law" actually says.  If a woman is going to have any hope at all of having a roof over her head and food on the table, she either needs to be married or live at home with dad.  Dad was not an option for Olivia; she was orphaned at a very young age and has no memory at all of either of her parents.  So from her point of view, she needed to remarry.  (Also, from her point of view, I am her mother; she has told me so many, many times.  There is no circumstance in which I would be willing to turn my back on Jessie.  By the same token, there is no circumstance in which I will turn my back on Olivia.) 
• In indigenous culture, it is not uncommon for parents to be either extremely abusive or extremely permissive with their children. Every single one of the widows in the LI program leans towards permissiveness when it comes to their children. Olivia asked her children to move with her; they said no, so Olivia would never attempt to force them.  It just goes against the grain.  
• In indigenous culture, the men have all the power.  Since Olivia's father and husband are both dead, the next man in line to be her authority is her father in law.  He would not allow the kids to move with their mother even if they wanted to, so even though it is Olivia's legal right to take them, it would not even cross her mind to fight him on it.  

I am positive that there are a lot of other cultural factors at play here that I do not understand, but these three things alone, coupled with the fact that I love Olivia no matter what she does means that I was willing to put my own feelings about her decision aside and take her to her new home.  

This whole situation has made me realize that I need to be quicker to extend grace to people instead of being so quick to judge.  The fact is that none of us really knows how another person thinks, why they do what they do, how they were raised, or what difficulties they have faced that have shaped them into the person that they are.  Yes, there is biblical right and biblical wrong.  Some things are black or white.  But the older I get, the more I realize that a lot of life falls into the gray, and that I will rarely go wrong by extending grace. 

There Is A Name

What do people think of when they think of you?  I've been especially nostalgic these days and am missing my grandfather terribly. We called him Papa, and he was the finest man I have ever known.  

One of my very favorite things about Papa was that when I told him I loved him, he never ever responded with an automatic "I love you too."  Instead, he would stop whatever he was doing, look me right in the eye, and say, "And I love you."  I am not the only grandchild who loves him dearly; we all do.  When he died, I wrote him a letter intending to slip it into the breast pocket of his suitcoat.  I remember approaching his casket, letter in hand, only to find a hundred other letters stuffed in there.  And Twinkies.  My diabetic Papa hid stashes of them everywhere, so I suppose it was only appropriate that he was buried with a few.  My guess is that it was my prankster dad who stuck them in there.  Anyway, the point is that Papa was deeply loved by a lot of people.  He died  nearly 19 years ago, but sometimes it feels like yesterday; heaven is sweeter to me because he is there. 

The name Papa is one of the most precious names there is to me.  It is security.  I never once questioned if Papa loved me or would take care of me.  I never wondered if I was welcome on his lap or if my presence was an intrusion, even though I visited him at work often.  Sometimes when I hear people calling their grandfathers by the name Papa, I secretly wonder if that man is worthy of the name.  (And honestly, I automatically assume that he isn't because I slip back into my 5 year old mind where "My Papa is better than your Papa.")  See, the thing is that there are certain things that should be implicit in a name.  Papa. Grammie.  Nanny. Mom. Daddy. Mama. Grampie. Whatever you call these relatives in your life, their names mean something.  They should instantly conjure up feelings of security and images of people who love us unconditionally, who only have our best interests at heart, and who would never ever intentionally hurt us.  Sadly, this is not always the case. 

I know that child abuse and neglect exist all over the world, America included, but when I lived in the US I wasn't usually slapped in the face with it every day even though I worked with troubled youth. Here in rural Guatemala it's every. single. day.  Usually multiple times a day.  It is heart-breaking and exhausting and depressing; quite frankly sometimes it makes me want to run away to anyplace I can stick my head in the sand and forget about it for a while.  But I can't.  I can't stop.  And here's why:  there's another Name.  

Emanuel.  He's here.  

El Roi.  He sees me.  

Adonai.  He's got it all under control.  

Abba.  He loves me. 

And I get the holy privilege of proclaiming His name to people who desperately need to know it.  It's the whole reason Loving InDeed exists, it's the whole reason I exist, and it's what makes the job of a  missionary so very different from humanitarian aid.  We get to tell the Gilbertos, Silvias, Henrys, Joels, and Yenifers of the world that there is Someone who loves them so, so much.  And because I love Him, it makes getting to share Him so worth it, even on the days when I want to run and hide.  There is a name.  And those who know that name will put their trust in Him because He will never forsake those who seek Him.  

THIS is the day

The irony of getting to hold a spotless baby lamb on 

Holy Week was not lost on me. 

I love holy week.  For me, it is a week to slow down and meditate...kind of a reboot. To be honest, it is really easy for me to slip back into the pattern of thinking that I have to work hard to earn God's love.  When I start acting like an employee instead of a daughter, something needs to change.  This is the week that reminds me again of just who I am.  I think the thing that amazes me the most about this week in the life of Jesus is His intentionality.  Jesus came knowing. He knew he'd be hated by His enemies, or worse, betrayed by his friends.  He knew He'd be used by people and mocked.  He knew the physical and emotional agony that awaited Him.  Yet He still came.

Today is Maundy Thursday--the day Jesus had His last supper with His disciples.  In this story too, it is His intentionality that sticks out to me the most.  Most of you have probably read a lot about the meal itself and understand the symbolism of "Take, eat; this is my body" and "this is my blood which is shed for the remission of sins." What you don't read much about is "and when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives,"  but it is just as powerful.  The thing is that we know what hymn Jesus sang that evening; it was the same hymn that had been sung at every Passover since Passover began.  It was Psalm 113-118.  Do you know what Psalm 118:24 is?  I bet you do, and you don't even realize it.  You probably split into groups and sang it as a round when you were a little kid in Sunday school.  "This is the day...this is the day...that the Lord hath made...that the Lord hath made...I will rejoice...I will rejoice...and be glad in it....and be glad in it."  Did you read it just now or sing it?  I sang it as I typed it.  The powerful thing about this is that a Jewish day goes from sunset to sunset. which means that on Thursday night when Jesus sang those words,  He was singing them about the day of His own crucifixion.  He knew what was getting ready to happen that day and He still sang "THIS is the day that the Lord hath made; I will REJOICE and be GLAD in it."  How could Jesus possibly be glad and rejoice about a day that would be filled with physical and emotional torture?  Hebrews 12:2 gives us the answer.  "...who for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."  What's the joy that was set before Him?  There's only a couple of things that could be:  the joy of obedience to the Father and the joy of making it possible to have us with Him one day.  I think it's probably a combination of both.  His love for the Father and His love for us made it possible for Him to say, "This is the day that the Lord hath made; I will rejoice and be glad in it."  He loves me.  He loves you.  Very intentionally.

The Nameless Weight

“What’s it really like?”  I get asked that about my life as a missionary more and more often.  I appreciate the question; it implies that people understand that even though my location is exotic, it isn’t all fun and games.  I’m not Indiana Jones with a Bible.  People seem to really want to know the good, the bad, and even the ugly.  The good and the bad aren’t difficult to articulate; the ugly is.  The ugly is like a weight…a nameless heaviness.  I can’t define it, but I know I’m not alone in it; lots of my fellow missionaries feel it too.  It’s like guilt, grief, anger, deep sadness, and fatigue all rolled into one.  This weight is always there; what changes is how heavy it feels.  Some days it's a pebble; other days it's a boulder.  Yesterday was a boulder, and I can't seem to shake it today.  

Yesterday I saw her.  It had been over a year since the last time.  I was walking off the property and back to my car.  I was happy. Then I rounded the corner, and there she was. She saw me and broke into a huge grin; I saw her and my stomach dropped.  She’s only about 10 years old, but she had her littlest baby brother on her back and her next oldest brother by the hand.  She looked like a tiny little mother standing there buying a few groceries at the tienda with babies in tow.  I guess she has to be the mother now.  Her mother is dead.  Cue the guilt.

 This is Herminia.  This picture of her hangs in my bedroom.  She was in Loving InDeed its first year.  When the program changed to include only widows or abandoned women with little ones, she remained since she qualified; she and her six kids were some of the most malnourished I had.  A few months later I heard that Herminia had remarried.  I wanted to apply the rules fairly, so since Herminia had a new man to help provide for her I let her go. 

Loving InDeed is not a registered NGO; Loving InDeed is me.  While I get lots of input from wise people I trust, I don’t have a board.  Ultimately I make the rules.  I could have chosen to break them for her.  I didn’t.  I could have pretended I didn’t know about her new husband.  I didn’t do that either.  Instead I made the decision to let her go, and in hindsight…well, there’s a reason they say hindsight’s 20/20.

It wasn’t long after Herminia got remarried that she got pregnant again.  I didn’t know.  I had my hands full with the new changes to the program and lost touch with her.  I had made the assumption that my friends would keep me apprised of anything important, but I have since learned that what's important to me is not necessarily what's important to them. No one is permanent in rural areas here.  People come; people go.  People and organizations give up trying to help, and they leave.  (Hence their distrust of me.  No one who has come to help in Santa Barbara has ever stayed.) Neighbors get frustrated, and they run away or migrate.  Family, particularly husbands and fathers, get bored and move on to greener pastures.  Friends get sick, and they die. Relationships are fluid because no one ever sticks around.  A person can only be abandoned so many times before they learn to flip that switch pretty quick.  You were here; now you’re gone.  Flip.  End of story.  You are no longer relevant.  Herminia was no longer a part of our picture so no one thought to tell me she was pregnant.  I didn’t know until I was driving around with Marina one day and saw a bunch of people at Herminia’s house. 

 “What’s going on up there?” 

“Herminia’s funeral.”

“What?  OUR Herminia?  She’s so young! That can't be! What happened?”

“She went into labor and struggled for more than a day. She said she knew something wasn’t  right, but they had no one to take her to the hospital.   The baby boy was born, and Herminia died a minute later.”

“WHY DID NO ONE CALL ME?!  WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME SHE WAS PREGNANT?  I COULD HAVE….”

...and so began the mental list I’ve been keeping of things I could have done to prevent this from happening...to stop a young woman from dying from something probably preventable...to keep seven children from being orphaned.  

A month later I was at the local church’s outdoor evangelistic campaign.  It was dark, and the place was packed.  I sat on the ground in the way back just taking it all in.  It wasn’t long before I felt eyes on me.  I looked up, and there she was--Herminia’s oldest daughter.  Her face was vacant.  She came over and sat beside me, careful to keep a few inches between us.  Every couple of minutes she would scoot a tiny bit closer.  After a while, she was close enough that I just reached out my arm and drew her to me.  She laid her head in my lap, and I stroked her hair and rubbed her back.  We never spoke a single word.  She stayed that way for over an hour.  My mind flooded with all the things I wanted to say but couldn’t because I don’t speak Mam:  I’m so sorry about your mom.  You’re beautiful just like her, you know.  I have pictures of her that I’ll give you someday.  How are you doing?  Is your grandmother treating you ok?  Do the men at her bar bother you?  How is your baby brother?  Is he eating?  So many things, but holding her had to be enough.  I have not seen her since that night.  Until yesterday. 

She knew me instantly and was clearly happy to see me.  I tentatively asked her how she was, hoping she spoke a bit of Spanish by now.  She said she was doing fine.  All her siblings were fine.  Everything was fine.  I wondered if any of it was true.  I wondered again if there was anything I could have done to save her mother.  I wondered if I made the right call when I let them go from the program.  Then I wondered about all the other families I have said no to.  I can’t take everyone; there has to be a limit.  And suddenly the weight of all those decisions came crashing down on me.

I know that I am not God.  I am not the Savior of the world.  I don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.  That knowledge doesn't seem make this job less heavy though.  It used to be that when I pondered the bigness of God I thought about creation…how He holds the whole universe in His hand and keeps it running. That's a pretty big Person, but I can almost wrap my head around that.  What I can't fathom these days is Someone SO big that He can hold all the hurts and all the trauma of everyone in the whole world.  Lately I see one pitiful street dog and am completely undone.  It's a rough place to be in since they're everywhere around here.  I saw one the other day while I was driving--the same day I met baby Kevin--and I got mad. The combination of emaciated, dying child and emaciated, dying dog on the same day just pushed me over the edge. I yelled at God in the car, “How am I supposed to carry all of this?  It’s too heavy!”  And He said, “I never asked you to.”   I have been thinking about that for a couple weeks now.  It rings in my head.  “I don’t have to carry this.  He’s not asking me to.”  But I’m not sure how to put it down. None of my missionary friends seem to know either.   So there it is:  the ugly.  That’s what it’s really like.