Uneasy Home

Hi, sweet friends. Fresh home from my trip to Africa... still trying to get my mind wrapped around time and space and all these eyes have seen. No apologies, just living life and trying to capture bits and pieces. But I thought I'd offer a few thoughts as they come.

I met Jesus last week. And he was eating injera with his hands. He spoke amharic. He wasn't the sterilized, blue-eyed face we paint. He was real. And I sang 'Lord prepare me to be a sanctuary' as I handed him a meal... likely the only one he'd have today. It surprised me because I seriously haven't thought of that song in a decade. But God had an idea to mold me and it fit. So I prayed. and sang. and smiled. Because the least of these has greater heart than this heart of stone I carry around in an insulated chest. Singing 'Emmanuel, our God is with us. Emmanuel, our God is here'.

I have seen him. And he crawls in worn jeans. He plays marbles on rough cement. He picks food from the sky high dump pile at Korah. He's a leper, being fed by someone else's hands and singing praise to the Father God who never leaves him. He lives in a mud hut, covered in red dirt, smiling toothless smiles. He waves and plays and knows joy that this girl has never found for being so protected by my stuff.

Jesus walks among us on holy ground covered in manure and red clay. He promised never to abandon us, so doesn't it apply that He is with us among the smells, the filthy, the wretched affluent like me?!