Filled Up to Overflowing

It's been good to be here. To see family and friends, to eat familiar foods, to easily get to and from places, to be able to buy what you want to, to be refreshed and encouraged. I'm really thankful for all of these things, and I think they strike me so much more profoundly now. Do you know how good sushi really is?

I spent last week traipsing around Texas--it was wonderful to catch up with friends and a few cousins. I was driving from Tyler to Waco one rainy morning, and after awhile in a car you can go slightly crazy . . . so I started talking to myself. And then I started exclaiming excitedly things like, "HEB!!! Yes!! I love HEB!!" (It's just a grocery store for you non-HEBers!) and "Braum's! Mmmm, I can just taste the cappuccino chunky chocolate frozen yogurt!" (and I did, just a few days later. It didn't disappoint.) and finally, the best of all was, "Bluebonnets!! There are still bluebonnets!! And I got to SEE them!!" Needless to say, I enjoyed my wanderings. The sweetest part of all, though, was good hugs and talks with old friends.
I confess that I have never understood what it meant to truly EAT of the Bread of Life. It's not because I didn't know I needed it--I did, but too often it was in a very philosophical way. But over the past year, I have been drained and emptied, and I have been hungry for that which cannot ever come from me. Thus, the best part of being back in the US has been worshiping with Redeemer, my home church. To be challenged, encouraged, and fed . . . yes, I am filled up to overflowing. I am rich.


But for all the joys, being here means I am not there. I am not in my other home of Ethiopia, I am not around my co-workers, the beneficiaries, injera bih wut, music, hugs and kisses in greeting . . . I miss all of that deeply. It's a part of me, a part of my heart and mind and soul. There is no one here to say "Endemanesh?" to in the mornings . . . or if I do people think I am crazy after all.
Since I have been in the US, two of our precious beneficiaries have died. I cry for them here, but I feel alone in my sorrow. Not because the people around me here don't want to care--I know they do. But they did not know Henok and Abrehat, and they will not know what it means to go back to my other world and those two not be there. My deepest privilege of the past year has been to know people--their faces, names, stories, and lives. But it leads to a deep pain at the loss of those same people. I want to do more, so much more. And here in this world I feel like I can do so very little. I pray. I cry. I try to tell their stories. But really I just wish their stories would have had a very different ending. I wish that Henok had lived to see 2 years . . . that he would have lived and laughed and kicked a soccer ball around. I wish that Abrehat hadn't been so beaten by life, that she had seen her children live and not die, that now she would be sharing the joy of the grandkids she never had. To keep pleading and fighting for different endings to these stories--that's the task before me, before all of us. If He will not give up until justice is established, we must follow in the fight.
May we be strong for the battle.