My stack of letters is roughly 4 to 5 inches tall sorted by the girl who wrote them and year. Stuffed into the mix were "LifeChange" one-page blurbs about how a girls life had change through the ministry and were meant to be posted at fundraisers. I am still in awe about how God has worked.
So many girls.
After briefly looking at certain ones, I laid on the floor to do my sit-ups (all 240 of them, working all abdominal muscles in rotating fashion...upper, side, lower and then girly push-ups incase you're wondering) and I realized that God had shown mercy on me when He prompted me to pull these out for the first time tonight...nearly two years later.
I don't think they conveyed the impact all those donor-dollars (nearly $180,000 in the five years with YFC). I read them now and I am privileged to not be so close to the situation that I can understand it from an outsider's perspective and yet I still have vivid memories of the day I was fortunate enough to receive those letters. I see both sides of the story.
There is incredible intensity in the words of those letters. I sit here and absorb it and lingering next to these memories is the day I cried in the Cornerstone Library over the loss of never receiving another one. I literally wept while chatting on Facebook to a friend who could have been a million miles away but was close enough to put her hand on my shoulders and say, "I hope everything is okay" as she clung to her backpack and walked out the door. Thank you Rita for sitting in Ithica, NY speaking to me and thank you to the unnamed CU student for walking out the library at just that moment. That was the moment, I was mercifully blinded to the intensity of those words in the letters until now.
God has shielded us from most of the intensity of the balance the lives around us. This is intensity captured also in one letter a donor wrote to me days after surgery where he was shown the mercy of being able to receive life from another. Intensity captured by a young girl on the humble shores of a distant island who was shown greatness in the ordinary. Intensity being revealed in an office across town to a woman to whom she trusted in God to heal, and he did. Intensity brought on by a life in crisis that is unfolding in an uncontrollable and unpredictable pattern that most likely will lead to abandonment.
We cannot sit knowing what we know, fellow Christians, and if there is one thing that I want to impress upon you, is that this intensity that we see is, in actuality, only a twinkle of the intensity we cannot see.
