May all of your expectations be frustrated
May all of your plans be thwarted
May all of your desires be withered into nothingness,
That you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child
And can sing and dance in the love of God
Who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
-Benediction

I imagine to some ears the benediction above sounds terribly depressing and hopelessly religious in the worst sense. The idea that nothing good comes without pain conjures up images of ascetic spirituality. Let me reassure you that I also resist the idea that our faith must, of necessity, be a thing of suffering. Yet I see in my life and those lives around me that we all DO experience a great deal of pain and suffering. I am faced with the truth that suffering is present for all of us and our choice is in how we respond.
When we can see that even our plans and dreams for good things are humble and simple compared to God’s great plans, we begin to see the essence of what we call “living out of weakness.” It’s not that we decide that suffering and pain are spiritual and begin to desire them for ourselves. It’s that we accept that suffering and pain ARE and God shows us how to move in them, through them, and beyond them to sing and dance in the love of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I have cried a lot these last few days. One big disappointment in the lives of some students I have grown fond of encapsulated for me a whole realm of sadness about life in general for the Babwisi here. The amount of daily suffering and despair that I am experiencing in others lives cannot be faced deeply on a daily basis, yet when someone I care about experiences a personal death to dreams, more of the pain of this people-group, sheep with no shepherd, comes crashing down into my heart . . . Unleashing deep, deep sadness.
On Monday, I went with women from my bible study to visit a sick friend. I sat on the tiny wooden chair beside his mattress, trying to take in the incongruity of his dim mud hut and a simple IV drip hung on a nail in the wall and trailing down to the line in his arm, held on with dirty bandages. Spare, used needles had been inserted into the IV bottle for safe-keeping and reuse. Tebeerwa lay motionless on the mattress, eyelids fluttering, lips trembling with exhaustion and pain. Malaria.
These people SUFFER. There lives are HARD. Children always hungry. People with treatable illnesses but no medicine, die. Babies that could thrive if there was milk available wither away into nothingness. Girls marry off at 13 or 14 when there is no money for school fees past primary school. Women deliver baby after baby in their mud huts until their bodies collapse from the births and the lactation and the grinding hardness of life.
Today is Ash Wednesday, a holiday I have never recognized before. But Jennifer, one of our team leaders, shed new light on it for me today in prayer meeting; calling it a day of lament, a day of recognition of the brokenness of our own hearts and the brokenness of the world around us and an acknowledgment that brokenness is the antipathy of God’s heart for his creatures. As we lament; witnessing and denouncing the sadness of this brokenness, we make room for hope in the same way that the burning of the spent fields makes room for the growth of new crops. Tears making room for healing.