Guatemala
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moreThe problem of evil? The Greater Problem of Good?
On Monday, August 08 th, 2011So after dinner, she picks coneflowers in the garden. Cradles the long stems in her apron skirt, carries them up through the picket gate. And she turns to me on the top step of the porch, holds her apron out to me, all those purple petals — art in an apron. “Why is there all this loveliness?” She wants to know. I almos...
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morewhat really happens when you give to the poor
On Thursday, February 03 rd, 2011The day her letter finally arrives, a letter from Xiomara, the girl in the middle of the frame and the only sponsored child I’ve met, I rip into it anxious, and part of me soars. We had wheeled happy the day we met, the happiest day. How long has it been since that day in Guatemala with Compassion Bloggers that had undone me, them showing me the bare heart of Jesus? She is a...
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moreTo Set Up a Complete Nativity Scene:
On Wednesday, December 15 th, 2010It’s Day 85 of my life-after Guatemala that I set out the nativity; it’s only now that I remember that the baby would be about 85 days old too. It’s my only souvenir from Guatemala — a red soil formed Mary, three clay-combed wise men, a Babe the size of a thimble. Headbands for the girls, a thin woven bracelet for ...
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morewhen you’re called to The Insignificant Significant
On Wednesday, November 10 th, 2010The child who lifted up a corner of my life and upended me was born on Remembrance Day and I am now three thousand miles away and two time zones to the east and how can I forget? It was her eyes. Bright, like dawn breaking, a light flooding over me living in the land of the shadow of death. How many times just this week do I flip through the photos of those twenty minutes that ...
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morewhen you’re dying to live radical: Fight the Middle Ground
On Thursday, October 14 th, 2010Thirty one days I have been home now. It’s walking through Walmart that I know I haven’t forgot. That I am petrified I might. It’s walking past the aisle of towels and dishcloths and tablecloths, looking for those girls of ours who had gone looking for leotards, for those scratchy things you need when the weather turns colder and the flip flops are flung in exchange for ...
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where in the world, in all this world, is God?
On Wednesday, September 22 nd, 2010It is the stench of the place. The rotting flesh, the burning rubber, the foul festering and decay. I’m a farmer’s daughter, a farmer’s wife, and this is what I know: I’ve fed hogs and I’ve extracted stillborn piglets from the uterus of sows in a gush of fetid fluids, and I’ve hauled manure. And I know the fetor of death exhaling from bloated green bellies and the w...
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morethere’s only a harvest when we break out of the mold
On Friday, September 17 th, 2010All along the far side of the field, the pods tangle, hang waiting in the gilded and the swollen and the tractor keeps pressing alongside for the filling, the combine reel spinning, a ferris wheel rising and falling, sweeping pods up and in, splitting open each dry shell for a string of white pearled beans and a celebration of harvest. ...
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when you want the first step in fixing a broken world
On Wednesday, September 15 th, 2010I don’t know really how to come back to this space. What to write about, what to say, what doesn’t sound flippant, indifferent… negligent. When our Compassion team debriefed on our last night in Guatemala, each of us were asked to share the one image we would take home, share one word picture that encapsulated our experience. I couldn’t speak. I had no words. Just this...
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morethe one word that fixes a broken heart, this broken world
On Tuesday, September 14 th, 2010Water runs down the middle of the alley, a silver tear in the shadows, and I can hear a baby crying. I’m walking a narrow Guatemalan City street, a street without house numbers, mailboxes, doorbells — more like a path through tin dominoes rusted right through. Brown eyes lurk in doorways, peer out between barred gates. A girl in a grimy pink t-shirt kee...
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morehome and hurting and healed
On Monday, September 13 th, 2010(Thank you for the prayers that winged me home and back to the farm in the very dark, early morning hours today. I am exhausted and broken and healed and groping for words for what has happened in my heart these last few days. I will never be the same and I don’t know what any of it means and I am asking God, “How can you use me?” I have seen. Now how do I res...
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if you like your dreams and miracles explained
On Saturday, September 11 th, 2010Posting live from Guatemala City: When he stood up to speak, his hands stuffed nervous in his pockets, his right shoe tapping anxious, I had no idea that the whole ugly mask was going to fall straight off this thing. I guess I should have seen it coming in his eyes, in that flicker, the way he held his head. “I am in business management in college,” Daniel says, his black w...
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the one question you’ve got to look in the mirror & really ask
On Friday, September 10 th, 2010I don’t know her name. Don’t know the names of any of the women whose homes I walked into where the earth gives away, them living in tin shacks clinging like bare barnacles up the side of sheer ravine, them hanging on at the end of the world. I wait at the edge. From behind the shacks at the rim of the gorge, a dog barks. His hollowed flank’s this gull...
