Love.

Love has continued to be such an overwhelming theme in my life and my heart.  So many times I have heard that whisper in my heart….Love them.

Just love them.

In the midst of my busy thoughts and my incessant planning and organizing and trying to figure out something so much bigger and crazier than me, while enduring the constant barrage of people saying why I shouldn’t do this.  It’s so easy to forget why I should.

I should because I am called.  I should because it’s the right thing for me.  I can’t help this intense love for people I don’t even know.  I can’t explain how I feel like my heart lives somewhere else these days.  I don’t want to leave my friends and family, but I feel like I can relate to Jonah in a new way.  And that if I am not obedient to what God has called me to do, then I believe I will probably end up in the belly of a fish too, perhaps more figuratively then literally in my case.

I ask God all too often why He couldn’t have called me to something else.  In my personality tests and such that I have done for school and training, my results are ridiculously lopsided.  Call it mercy, being “blue”, compassion, feeling, whatever…it’s what God gave me to work with.  So, I get that people think I don’t see the whole picture — because honestly, I probably don’t.  I see hungry kids, starving babies, mommas dying of AIDS and knowing they can’t do anything to change what is going to happen — not only to them but to their children.  I see people who don’t understand God’s love because they have never known human love.  And my job is to love them and serve them and cry with them and pray with them and hold them when there are no words.  Because I can’t know about what is happening in these far away places and not do something.

There is a quote by William Wilberforce that says, “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”

I am choosing not to look the other way.