Hello weary soul, broken heart, busted-up battle-worn traveller. I see you. Trying to catch your breath because there’s a million to-do’s and not enough minutes. I see you. Trying to hold your act together because everybody else does. I see you. Asking how many acts are in this play and when does it ever end. The trying and the failing and the falling and the hoping no one sees and the wondering if our lungs and our hearts can take this for much longer. We all know how to colour in all the right lines and live in all the right boxes and say all the right things. Never mind that somehow along the way we lost our joy. Never mind that we need elixirs of this and that just to get out of bed every day. I see you. Because I see me. And we’re the same. We both need a light in this darkness. If I’m being honest, my life has been about me for far too long. I’ve gotten quite skilled at ignoring the status of the world apart from my little world. The world that’s convenient and comfortable and cozy and safe and easy. But I have recently been awakened in a powerful way to the calling of God on my life and the need to get outside my (invisible) boxes and share hope with the world. Missionfield every woman every man every brave and broken and busted heart. It’s not a life for the faint of heart and many days I’ve wished it wasn’t my life… but there’s nothing like being aligned with what you know you’re supposed to do. It’s utterly and fantastically rewarding, and mostly not in the ways I used to think were rewarding. Because when you start to let your tidy, ordered little life become messy and disheveled and topsy-turvy in all the right ways, you find that this new chaos that breaks down your life actually puts it back together. The death of the comfort and the death of the boxes gives way to a life of wide open spaces like you can’t even imagine. And best of all, you start to see. The light turns on and you really, really see. You see 3-year-old Amarylis in Guatemala who lives far up a mountainside in poverty like we can’t possibly comprehend, and who, because of the unsanitary water and lack of medicine, came down with a severe eye infection. There was nothing that could be done to stop the spread and so her eyes had to be removed. And… her father abandoned them because it just got too hard. It breaks your heart that this beautiful little girl has had to go through such trauma. You hear about these kinds of stories, and from a world away it’s so easy to keep them at an arm’s length distance. But when you’re no longer thousands of miles away, you’re in the very same room… the reality changes you. It hits you like a ton of bricks that your own life, even crazy piled upon crazy, is nothing to shake a stick at. You see this little girl in such intense darkness and all at the same time it’s depressing and the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. You feel like by process of elimination you must be the saviour in this situation but you have no idea what to do or say. And then out of nowhere she reaches over and turns the light on for you. There she is singing and yelling and twirling and dancing, brazen and bold, in her torn and tattered white dress. She comes over, touching first my hand, my arm, my face, then each eyelash… so gently. And in that moment, the dark cloud of darkness that has been sitting on me for months is lifted. What a gift. Seeing goes deeper than eyes. She saw me and I saw her, but not only that, I saw God more clearly in that moment than I ever have. In ancient Greek, Amarylis means “sparkling eyes”. How rock-your-world-amazing that even a little girl with no eyes has the eyes of faith that we all need… to just keep dancing and singing and seeing and believing that no matter how dark the night, sunrise is coming. My prayer is that through these songs and stories and inspirations and musings... your eyes would open. That you would encounter a God not only to believe in, but a God to experience. A God who knows your name. A God who laughs with you and cries with you. A God who knows your hurts and your disappointments, your wounds and your scars, your doubts and your fears. A God who, no matter how far we run or how much we mess up in our lives, always comes to find us. A God who came to earth to be hope for us. A God who SEES you. Be real. Be brave. Be loved. J&C