What is all this really about? Why would we leave the comforts and  privileges of America to help people all the way across the world? After all,  we’ve worked  hard to get where we are. Our home, our business, our  friends, our family, our son’s school and his friends, all our stuff. We’re  leaving it all behind. But why would we do such a thing?

It all started deep in the heart of Rwanda. A beautiful country that had been  devastated by genocide. Nearly a million people were brutally slaughtered.  Most of them were chopped into pieces, one by one, by machete wielding  killers. And there I was, sitting with a woman who had lived  through the  genocide. She told me about the bodies that were everywhere,  just scattered  across the ground. She described the terrible odor of the  bodies rotting and  blood flowing like a river. Even though she held back the tears as she shared  with me how her own family  had been gruesomely murdered, I could see the deep hurt within her. And there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do to change the past, all I could do was let her know I cared.

Soon after, I found myself standing on a rough dirt and gravel road that had been deeply rutted by the rain. It was there I met the children who would change my life forever. Everything I thought was important to me was beginning to change. As I looked these kids in the eyes I knew I could not leave, never to return. These orphans of the streets were some of the worst victims of the genocide. They had no home, no family, no food, no shelter, sleeping on beds of cardboard and eating from the trash they were merely surviving. They were lonely and scared and they were just like my own children. They loved and desperately desired my attention. Holding my hand, running their fingers through my beard and fighting for who would sit on my lap next and I loved every second I spent with them. When I returned to my hotel room I deeply wept, knowing nothing would ever be the same again. And it hasn’t been.

But now what? What do we do about it? With all the suffering in the  world,  can we really  make a difference? The answer is, of course we can.  That’s  why we’re going,  because of course we can make a difference. We  bring the  love of Jesus. We  bring a message of hope and redemption, it is  the  message that saves. We  have what the world is aching for. There is so  much  darkness out there but  when we reach out to the dark and desperate  places, it  is there that we shine our brightest as we rescue those who are  perishing. It is in that place and in that moment that we truly begin to realize-we can change the world.

And so we’ll go.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Jason and Cara. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.