a foreign language

Yesterday I woke up and my eyes were weighty. It felt painful to hold them open. I couldn’t help but think it was a result of what I had just witnessed the day before. Though my eyes feel better today, my heart continues in heaviness. I consider maybe I’ve been given the wrong vocabulary, an unsuitable language to describe what I’m experiencing. Perhaps it’s a little like having a map for the wrong city. While it may be useful, it is meaningless in a location for which the map was not modeled after.
On Tuesday, the places we visited were deeply troubling. There is no answer for the things I saw. I feel embarrassed at my wealth. I live in such plenty and yet injustice and suffering are very real. I feel like a walking contradiction. There is no denying that God is near. It feels like everyone here is poor.
This week we visited 3 slums, where the poorest of the poor live and in an instant I am changed. They no longer feel distanced from me. Our hands met, my heart was gripped. It is too early to pretend I know any conclusions from what I’ve seen, I’m quite ignorant of the struggles of these beautiful people, and I’m ashamed to say. I’m shameful because God is close to them, as you walk the rocky paths you sense him there, just ahead of you, as if you caught his scent. You follow him through each crooked ledge, over buckets of dirty water under freshly hung clothes that drip onto you. Quickly you are distracted but He is there. Despite smells that turn my stomach this way and that, there is beauty to behold in these slums-I chase God as I slip on the rock, past the bamboo that pokes out of the trash infested creek where someone bathes. I peek in through cardboard make shift homes, only to find smiles and joyful greetings. What is it about a place like this that can cause someone to smile and again I think it must be God. In a brief moment, I realize up until now, maybe I’ve been looking for God in the wrong places.

I’m sorry that I’ve not words to describe what I’m feeling and experiencing-I hope it comes to me but I think that maybe it’s fitting. I feel like I have seen something that makes me full of awe and something that feels like a war zone all in one.
The things I’ve seen are contrary to anything I’ve ever seen before. I am scared of these images-that they will escape me and afraid also that they won’t. I ask myself, how does one carry this with them? How does one remember the poor when their own world is so different?