Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Every day the same. Yeah!

I should really be getting ready for work, but I'm just not that into it. If it didn't require getting up off the couch, showering and doing all that follows to try and make myself presentable to the world, it would be easier. There are so many things in each day that must be done again tomorrow and the next day over and over. Just think how much time we'd save if we didn't have to shower, brush teeth, beautify (or at least de-uglify), do dishes and vacuum and bathe the dogs and do laundry and clip toenails and pluck eyebrows and, well you get the picture. What if each day we woke up to a world where all we got to do was learn and imagine and create and relate with the people we love. Would that be such a bad thing?

OK now I'm thinking of all the people I've met who wake up each morning in much more difficult circumstances and I'm feeling like a thankless complainer. I've shivered in a hut in Romania in the coldest weather I've ever known and talked with a father trying to keep his toddler son warm and fed with a few sticks for firewood and little else.

I've hovered in the doorway of a hovel in the largest slum in Kenya. No running water. The toilet is the ditch outside that runs disgustingly through the entire massive encampment. It's hot. The flies are relentless. The smell is staggering. The one adult is trying to care for her children and her sister's children. All eight of them living in this one-room, dirt-floor nightmare. She's the last adult left in her family and she is HIV positive.

I've held a tiny, beautiful, blue-eyed baby girl in an abandoned shipping container in a temporary village made up entirely of abandoned shipping containers in Armenia. The mother, who was my age (37 at the time) looked like she was 60 and begged me to take her child. She and her husband were trying to survive with the remaining six children and they didn't need another mouth to feed.

Well then. I guess I'm going to go shower now and celebrate my life. I have plenty to celebrate.

3 comments:

Extreme Educators said...

Why do we have to go to all the depressing parts of the world. Why haven't we lounged on the French Riviera, or cruised through Alaska, or gone on an African safari? Oh wait, you did that last one. I think it's God's fault for calling us to minister to the orphan and the widow. Good thing He gives us His strength and Compassion when we feel like it's just too much. Keep on truckin', you're making a difference, even if it seems small.

Mom said...

If I can't twitter with you, I am at least blessed to finally find you in blogging land...where friends are bountiful, thoughts are random, and God's grace is something that IS the same everyday, thank goodness! To that I say YEAH!
At least I feel closer than a whole continent away in our "other" life we shared together in what seems so many years ago...
Oh...and thanks for the b-day voicemail on Friday. Yes, Neil and I and that extreme educator who lives my house rocked out...if only you were there, the night would have been complete my friend!
Judy
P.S. Don't let my blogging name of Mom throw you off.. this is NOT your mother.

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