It has been over a month since I bounced any signs of life back to all of you. I’m sorry for that. A lot has happened in the last month, so I’ll try to list off the essentials.
In the last few months I’ve gotten really close with a car guard in town named Eric. Eric is 27, he spent six of those years in prison, but God got a hold of him at some point and now he’s one of the closest things to Jesus I’ve ever seen. A while back he made his shack a little bigger and took in about thirteen street kids. He treated them as if they were his own kids, looked after them, disciplined them, forgave them – the list goes on. It was a beautiful thing to see, and the love that he showed them changed their lives in really tangible ways.
Some time has gone by and the thirteen street kids are down to two or three. The rest decided they enjoyed the ‘freedom’ of the street a little more – running around on their own, begging, and smoking glue and petrol (not that they ever completely stopped, there was just a lot of progress being made in breaking that cycle). It has been hard to watch that shift happen, and it has been hard to know how to best look after and pursue those kids, but even with all of that, my relationships with all of the boys are better than ever. There is a depth to many of our friendships that I thought would never come, and we understand each other far more than we did even a month or two ago. My friendship with Eric is incredible. I have learned so much from him about life, about these street kids and their culture, about forgiveness, about following Christ – the list goes on.
Pray that God would continue to teach me how engage this street culture that, in many ways, is still completely foreign to me.
My grandfather died on April 5. Last summer I was able to move in with him and my grandmother to help take care of him. We watched more Sanford & Son than you could possibly imagine, and he told me story after story from his 83 years of roaming the earth. I celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with them, and all summer I got to watch the kind of love that gets born out of watching sixty years go by together. I don’t know if I have sixty years left in me, but I hope that kind of love lives inside of me somewhere. Living with them for the summer was one of the best decisions of my life. I’ve been playing through the home videos in my head in my head all week. I think my grandfather is excited, because He’s been talking about going to see Jesus for a while now – and the food in heaven is better than the food at Oak Hill Assisted Living Center, even if you have to share it with Mexicans (I am pretty sure his seat at the banquet table is next to a Mexican, a black man, and some old friends and family that he’s been missing for a long time – and I think when you share food that good in the full-on presence of God, fellowship and racial reconciliation happen faster than you can say, “Pass the nachos.”)
Keep praying. I can’t even begin to tell you the impact of your prayers, or how much peace comes from knowing that you are all praying – even if it’s only every now and then. I will try to be better about keeping you updated in the next few weeks. I only have one month left until I hop a plane back to the grand old U.S. of A. Has the election gotten out of hand yet? I sure hope so.
