Community of the broken

I don't understand God's plan. The longer I live the more I realize I have no idea...

I spent my Memorial Day in Juárez, México helping a woman get a bus ticket that will take her on a three day journey across México, almost to Guatemala.  She is going to rescue her 16 year old daughter and 2 year old granddaughter from a terrible situation that wreaks of trafficking and abuse.  

I got a phone call from Margarita when I was standing in my mom's kitchen in Georgia.  Literally minutes after returning from Peru, while explaining my own crazy story of desperation and hope to my family, I answered the international call; thinking it was coming from the country I had just left behind.  I had no idea that before the tears even dried from my own story, God was allowing another one to begin.  

The one way bus ticket that Margarita called begging my help to purchase cost $100; exactly the same amount of money I had been given only hours before in my own moment of desperation.

There is something about being out of control and helplessly reliant on someone; anyone.  You secretly hope and pray that if you share your story, someone else's heart will break enough that they can't help but stop and enter in.  

It is hopeful and helpless to know that those around you have the power to help, if only they are willing.

Margarita's story affected me differently right now than it would have at any other moment in my life.  What I may have brushed off before, made my own broken heart ache now. I heard my own mom's voice in Margarita's; desperation of a mother that would do anything to help save her daughter.  I knew I had to help.  I just had no idea how.

Today we went to a bus station in Juárez and bought three bus tickets for Margarita.  One for her trip across the country on Saturday and two others for her and her daughter's hopeful return from Tapachula to Juárez.  For Margarita this isn't the end of her story, but just the beginning. She sets off on a journey Saturday that I'm asking you to help me support and pray for.

The honest truth about this whole situation is that I would rather not enter in, I would rather not care.  However no matter how hard I try, God will not allow me to take on that role.  Instead, He allows me to go through situations in my own life that will help me understand and care even more.  In my own brokenness I am better able to sympathize with those around me.  He allows me to hurt so that I may better know how to help heal.

I don't think that life is coincidental and I definitely have no idea what God has planned. He continues to carry me to "strange places," and I know that all I have to do is follow.  I'm not called to put all the pieces together but to trust and hold on loosely, as the things of this life pass in and out of my hands.  

May our hearts be broken enough for those around us that we cannot help but enter into each other's story.  May He teach us through our own brokenness to care, rather than to simply cure.

"As a community of faith we remind one another constantly that we form a fellowship of the weak, transparent to him who speaks to us in the lonely places of our existence and says: Do not be afraid, you are accepted." -Henri Nouwen