Bottles, cans, wrappers, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, and other miscellaneous filth blanket the ground. Goats trample garbage in their rush to escape the rain. Crumbling cement walls stand meaninglessly on the landscape. A torn blue tarp waves in the wind.
Someone calls this home.
A sense of spiritual decay is as rampant as the physical decay. Hope feels like that tarp, waving aimlessly in the wind. Joy has been smothered under the garbage heaps. Peace has turned to loneliness.
Two women stand on a heap of garbage. They’ve walked two hours to be here just in case the truck comes today. One hugs a swath of plastic around her neck against the rain. The other wears a plastic bag over her dress. One of them has an injured knee. I ask Shadrach to ask them if I can pray for them. They say yes. I pray for strength, a sense of God’s presence, a reminder of the riches stored up for them in heaven. She smiles and I cannot continue. I’m choked up because I don’t know what to say.
My biggest challenges are overcoming fear and pride, in reaching out to people I don’t know, in battling the feeling of desperate inadequacy in sharing the Gospel. Her biggest challenge is staying alive. She told that to Chris.
What character! What a heart! Strength without sustenance, endurance beyond mere patience, a heart that has for years held on to that tattered tarp of hope. She amazes me to no end. She’s not garbage. She’s a shell. Inside her the hardships form a pearl of great worth – a character born of stress I’ve never imagined. This woman is the person I want to be – enduring, patient, hopeful. She will someday experience this verse – and oh, how much more keenly than we will. “The will rise up on wings like eagles and soar. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not grow faint.”
God bless her.
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