My heart was not quite prepared for what I would gain and then leave behind in Nicaragua. Usually, I operate with a thin veil of concrete wall around my heart to ensure that my life can be void of the aching feeling of missing something enitrely too much. Not here. Here, I lived walls down and heart functioning at full capacity.
And the aftermath is harder than I remember it to be.
Living with no walls left me vulnerable to feeling the effects of compassion, empathy, outrage, confusion, and hopelessness. Negative in connotation, but rather life changing as these lead me to understand God in a way I’m not sure I had before.
As humans, we often say we are hopeless and are subject to relying on God because only he can change the most outrageous injustices of this world. Yet, our lives and our prayers seldom reflect what our words say. As much as we have head knowledge of God’s sovereignty and rule over the world, we are equally clouded by pride within our hearts as to never fully bring us to our knees in surrender.
I, however, lost this battle with pride and arrogancy in a village right outside of the bustling city of Granada where I met a 15 year old named Francella.
In a house made of tin with a dirt floor she shared with her mother and four younger siblings; she sat in a chair upon our arrival. Her countenance was mixed with excitment and anxiousness as she most likely knew our purpose for being there. After a brief intro of our entourage and simple niceties between Julio (our translator) and Francella’s mother, the story began to unfold of her life that was once filled with activity and child-like ease, now subjected to a chair due to an ailment of her legs that made it impossible to bear any weight.
As we heard more of the story- the gradual decline of strength, movement, and eventually full use of her legs; I couldn’t help but be absolutely overcome with first compassion that stirred into rage that settled into the utter brokenness of my heart. These feelings lingered for days as I couldn’t understand the purpose of stealing away her childhood and replacing it with a life of worry and stationary rememberance of what she no longer had the opportunity to enjoy.
While I should have been encouraged by her joyful presence that had not seemed to waver due to her ailment or her hopefulness of the miracle she was sure would be her’s one day; I walked away feeling hopeless and frustrated.
In this day, partenered with grief of a failing government that marked a cycle of poverty and the reason Francella could not be supplied with proper medical care; the Lord certainly piled brokenness upon my heart as to break me down, here, in a land where I had no walls to protect myself in the first place.
For so long I have lived with a faux veil of vain glory in which I believed that if I was able to do enough, I could change the world. But in a world destined for destruction, change is not our responsibility. Dependence is.
Not knowing how to cope with the weight of injustice, I turned to prayer. But not a prayer because that is what we are taught to turn to. A prayer because I had a new realization of the necessity of it. Bringing a new awareness that while prayer is suppose to be the first thing we should turn to, it’s often the last.
I would like to say I’ve learned this lesson and will never forget. However, I am sure I will and the Lord, in his kindness, will use another injustice to remind me that I haven’t leaned upon him as I should.
Hope, and who you put it in, will either build you up or tear you down. My hope, now more than it has ever been, resides fully in the Lord. My confidence that, whether in this life or the next, Francella will walk, skip, run and dance into the arms of Jesus is full-proof because that is what He has promised as our healer.
While the compassion still lingers for Francella and Nicaragua as a whole, I am no longer weighed down by the hopelessness that seems to mark this world. Instead, I am in awe that we have remnants of joy-filled lives in the midst of such brokenness. Join me in prayer for Francella, Nicaragua, and the ministry of REAP as it is necessary that we remember to lay down the things we were never meant to carry.
Leaving such a place that tugged on my heart strings, seen and unseen, I know it will be hard waking up anywhere that is not Nicaragua. What a beautiful gift it is to love something enough to feel its absence when it is no longer there.
Until next time, Nica.
