Rwandan Lesson

Yesterday, it hit me.

I've been home from Rwanda for two weeks.  Our trip seems both like a lifetime and a blink of the eye away.  People have stopped asking me about my trip, just as I begin to really understand all that God was teaching me in that week.  Here's what I've been thinking about the most since I've been back.

Relationships.

Yup, relationships. 

Our team spent a week investing in the lives of students at the Institute for Women of Excellence (IWE), girls that most of us had never met.  These girls had been in our thoughts and prayers for so long, and yet we didn't know each other, speak the same language, or have any obvious common interests.  And yet, each of us on the team felt very lead by God to invest in these girls, to encourage them in their life and their walk with the Lord, to help them become the women God designed and created them to be.

I felt called to be there, to invest, but I want to be honest and transparent - it was HARD.  Hard to always put myself out there for the girls, to be vulnerable, to share my life and my story with complete strangers.  But they totally ate it up.

I've been thinking a lot this past week about Fortune, one of the girls who graduated from IWE during our trip.  She was quiet, often seemed sad, and was so desperate for a relationship with me and other members of my team.  She craved letters from her sponsor, the American supporting her education at IWE.  Like many of the other girls at IWE, she made me go through every photo on my phone and tell her about each person in the picture, how I knew them, and what was happening in the picture.

But Fortune was different than the other girls.  She asked me to write her a letter for her to read after graduation, to encourage her, to help her have perseverance to continue her education.  She asked me very specifically to pray for her by name as she prepared to take her national exam in preparation for college entry.  I keep remembering her sweet face, her heavy breathing, the tweed coat she wore, the way she pursued and desired love and relationships.

In the weeks I've been home, I've realized that Fortune is no different from me and the women and girls I know here in Charlotte.  Our hearts crave relationships, to be known and pursued by others, to be seen as worthy of relational investment.  I had to fly halfway around the world to have perspective on the value of the people I have in my life back home.  I wonder how God is teaching and calling me to be more relational and intentional back here, in my current mission field...the subject of many future and current prayers, I assure you :).

So in closing, here's a peak at my prayer journal from my trip, as God was beginning to teach this relational lesson to me.  I wrote this on October 29, 2012.  As always, prayer journal entries are not edited, so I apologize in advance for any poor grammar.

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Father, I was thinking in the shower how much I want to be a relational person, how much I want to be relational in my life and in ministries I'm involved in.  But, as I always forget, relationships are difficult, and we are all affected by the fall and sin has entered us and all of our relationships.

BUT you pursue us.  You don't mind if our relationship with you feels awkward, not how you/we want it to feel.  You reach out for us and are willing to work with us through our yucky parts, our troubles, our past.

THAT is what you desire from human relationships - for between me and the IWE students, between teammates, between husband and wife, and in our families.  Father, what an amazing experience is this week, for you to encourage and impress upon me how I must seek and pursue relationships, how I must be willing and available to be vulnerable and open with others so they can know me, and I can know them. 

Father, please work powerfully in my heart, and give me strength and courage to pursue relationships with the girls at IWE, with my team, with my family, and hopefully some day with my future husband.  Break my heart in ways that will help me to go deeper relationally with others, and to not be afraid to feel emotions in relationships. Father, you just make me fall more in love with you every day...thank you!!!