"A heart can break a thousand times before it finds, the love that makes it beat again."- Chris and Conrad

It's been almost 4 months, and I still find myself clicking through these pictures. It seems like I can stare at them forever. I close my eyes and try to imagine the kids right in front of me. It's hard, but for a moment, nothing else in the world matters. Everything is just so trivial. Everything that bugs me, every hardship I'm going through, everything that once mattered so much means absolutely nothing to me, and I'm just reminded of how small my problems are.

And it is in these moments when I'm most upset about the world, my world, and what it has become. It's so hard being surrounded by people who just don't know or don't care, and the worst, don't care to know. It saddens me to see people drowning in their own seas of not even problems, but anything, infatuations, obsessions, whatever. It's stupid. I don't get it. I do it too, and I hate it.

I know I'm here for a purpose. I know people are as lost here as anywhere else. I know there's a lot I can do here. I know. I know. I just need to vent and be anti right now. anti-people, anti-things, anti-world, anti- stupidity, anti-i don't know. maybe i'm just bitter. Maybe I just see Malawi as a place that escapes all the silliness of our culture. It's simple, and I miss that, so much. Why can't it be like that here? I hate being caught up in all this silliness, and then feel like I don't belong here.

Sometimes I contrive these plans in my head of how I can logically go back to Malawi within the next year. What if I just up and left right now, this instant? Of course it makes no sense, but why does it have to? Nothing ever really makes sense to me anyways.

So that's why I go through these pictures. Because that's all I have that's tangible at least. I look at these faces and my heart breaks again and again, and again, and at the same time, it's these very faces that keep my heart beating. It's times like these when I know I'm going back, I can't not.

"A Smile Without Lips"

Just wanted to share something from a book I'm reading, A Hole in our Gospel by President of World Vision, Richard Stearns

" In the midst of war, true evil abounds; unspeakable atrocities are committed; brutality is endemic. War is never benign. But war is more than just an impersonal term that we can brush aside at will. It has a face-- and it is human. One human face of war, whom I will never forget is that of a woman named Margaret, who was caught in the violence of Northern Uganda's war against the rebel Lord's Resistance Army. One day Margaret, six months pregnant, was working in her garden with several other women when rebels--a group of child soldiers led by an adult LRA commander--emerged from the bush. They had come to steal food and other supplies. But stealing was not enough, and they attacked the women, literally hacking Margaret's friends to death with machetes while she watched. But as they approached Margaret to do the same, the commander noticed that she was pregnant. Believing it would bring bad luck to murder a pregnant woman, he instructed his child soldiers to not kill her. Instead, he gave the order to cut off her ears, nose, and lips and leave her to die; that way, he reasoned, her subsequent death would not be on their hands. So they carried out the unthinkable and left Margaret maimed and bleeding to death.

But Margaret was found and rushed to a hospital for treatment. Remarkably, she survived and three months later gave birth to a son, James. She and James were then brought to World Vision's Children of War Center, where she received trauma counseling, support, and, later, skills training as a seamstress. Margaret, traumatized and permanently disfigured, was trying to rebuild her life and be a mother to her child. This is where I met her, perhaps a year after her ordeal.

To our American sensibilities, Margaret's story seems beyond comprehension. There is nothing in our frame of reference that allows us to understand such brutality. What happened next can only be understood through the miracle of God's love--as a demonstration of the incredible power of the gospel to redeem even the darkest kinds of evil.

One day, months after her son's birth, Margaret saw the commander who had given the order to main her, arriving at the same rehab center. He had been captured and had also been sent for counseling and rehabilitation. I cannot imagine the emotions this must have triggered in Margaret. In great distress, she frantically told one of her counselors that she had to leave immediately, that she could not be near him, and that she wanted to kill him. In response, the man was moved to a different rehab center several kilometers away. But Margaret's anxiety remained.

World Vision counselors began working with this man. At first, he denied that he had committed the atrocities. They worked, too, with Margaret, tying to lessen her anxiety and exploring the possibility of forgiveness. After weeks had passed, the man confessed to his involvement in Margaret's attack, even as she worked through her own fears and anger. Finally, a meeting was arranged. The man asked Margaret to forgive him. And Margaret, reaching deeply into the source of all forgiveness--Jesus Christ--forgave. Here again was the power of the gospel to redeem and restore, and to meet evil and turn it back. On the wall of the Children of War Center are photographsy of that day--Margaret and this man who had mutilated her.

He is holding little James in his arms as she stands next to them--smiling without lips."

And so people ask me why I believe in God, this is why.