I saw a malnourished baby yesterday. He wore only a tattered shirt, so I could see how skinny his little legs were. He looked about 10 months old, but the size of his head told me he was probably a lot older. He was crying, and the look in his eyes seemed so desperate. He was being held by a boy who looked about 6 or 7 years old; there was no parent in sight. And my heart broke.
I am living in a place where daily I see things or hear stories that remind me how thousands of years of sin has reaped unfathomable sorrow. And in this place the sorrow seems almost hopelessly irreversible.
Today the hospital chaplain texted me pictures asking me to pray for a baby who has burns over at least 50 percent of their body. There is no electricity or running water here, so burns are a frequent occurrence, as everyone cooks over open fires. My husband has treated multiple people with burns down to the bone. He also sees dental abscesses that track below the rib cage; a flesh-eating fungus so serious that it has reached the brain; huge, advanced cancer growths; bone fractures from months before that didn’t receive the proper prompt attention and care; botched circumcisions; gross deformities and malformations in babies; dire malaria cases; numerous lung infections; and the list could continue.
The need overwhelms us as we try to prioritize how best to help.
This is the place to which God called us. It was in 2023 that God stirred our hearts and turned our lives about-face toward mission work. That year He sold our house for us, gave my husband a willing heart to walk away from a successful surgical practice at the peak of his career, and moved us eight time zones away.
We have been living at our mission post for seven months now. Daily we are exposed to the sad sights and stories that weigh heavily on our hearts. Stories of hunger, debt, betrayal, death, fear, and superstition. The need overwhelms us as we try to figure out where to begin or prioritize how best to help. Yet being here has better helped us appreciate the immense burden on Jesus’ heart as He hung upon the cross carrying the sins of the entire world. Now I have a better understanding of the painful heaviness that crushed His heart with sorrow. Jesus also knew what those sins would cause—exponential grief and pain through the ages to come. Praise God He endured.
Andrew Murray once wrote, “O teach us to love [the cross] not only because on it Thou didst bear our curse, but because of it we enter into the closest fellowship with Thyself.”
Serving as missionaries is enlarging our hearts to a deeper appreciation for forgiveness, a greater reliance on Christ, and an expansion of love we have not known before. In this place, with Jesus’ help, we are learning to endure.
That love that raised Jesus as victorious is the same love that directed us here, to a place I might otherwise describe as God-forsaken. That love, through the heaviness and heartache, more fully reveals the heart of God to us. And that love offers peace and privilege to work hand in hand to bring hope and healing to the hopeless.