Kindle Notes & Highlights
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January 7 - January 12, 2021
Togo was the least happy country in the world.
when I didn’t have anything, David looked around, and David saw me.”
I realized that God had used me to save their lives—but God was also using them to save my life. They accepted and loved me at one of the lowest points of my life.
Love looks around. Love looks around and sees the world with compassion. Love looks around and sees the world through the eyes of God. Love looks around and sees the marginalized, invisible people who are often overlooked. Love looks around.
I wondered how to be part of a team whose approach to Togo I didn’t like or agree with. I wondered how to practice medicine as a white American without perpetuating negative stereotypes. I wondered how to help the Togolese people without doing more harm than good. I wondered how to care for Togolese patients without robbing them of their dignity and autonomy.
Anger, frustration, and helplessness welled up in me as I realized my questions led only to more questions.
Lives ended very differently than they began. Not with fanfare, but with secrecy. Not with public announcements, but with fiercely guarded privacy.
confounded by the paradox that the human body can be so resilient and so fragile at the same time.
Centuries ago, the Celtic Christians called this the Thin Space, the place where the division between earth and heaven,
I realized that joy does not arise in the absence of sadness. Joy arises in the midst of it.
John 3:16 says that “God so loved the world,” not that God so liked it.
Something inexplicably beautiful appears in brokenness, not despite the cracks but because of them. Our bodies and our souls and our hearts break as we go through life. The hope we can hold on to is not that we will remain unbroken, but that when we do inevitably break (and we all do), God will restore us as only a Kintsugi master can: carefully, artfully, beautifully—with extravagant, glimmering grace. Our Potter Who Art in Heaven.
Now I realized that not only does Love look around and see us, and not only does Love motivate us to look around and see others, but also, when we look around, at even the most broken places and situations that surround us, we see Love.
Compassion, in its most extreme forms, is not cute; it is costly. It isn’t always sweet; sometimes it is downright scary. Compassion makes you suffer and sweat and smell. It requires you to pour yourself out, sometimes, until there’s nothing left.
LOVE! IT WAS Love! The answer had been in front of me all along, and I hadn’t seen it. There was Massiko, who told me that love looks around. And the father of the two-year old who had said, “There is love in your eyes. You looked at my little girl with love.” And Omari, who had said, “I want to see patients like you do. You look at them with love.”
The resurrection stands forever as a promise that Love always comes back to life. Our bodies wear out and die—but our souls never do. Which means that in this world, we are merely shadowboxing with danger.
Help me love this rock,
No place is God-forsaken if people, who experience and express the love of God, go there.
None of us is capable of single-handedly changing the world. But if we each reach out to the people around us, we can bring healing to the cracks within our reach. We can remind people with our physical presence and with acts of tangible kindness that Love is here, Love is now, and there is no place on earth that Love cannot or will not or dare not go.
By some mercy, and some mystery, brokenness shows us the way to healing. Wounds become windows into the promise of resurrection, and we recognize Jesus in a way we never could have seen him before.
First, you start with hope that not only can the world get better, it is getting better. And then you invest your life and your talents and your resources into the people and the problems within your reach. You catch people comin’ thro’ the rye who are within your grasp to save. It’s possible to bring healing to our beautiful but broken world—but it will only happen if we each do our part. Because the world never has been, and never will be, changed by one person doing it all. The world is much more likely to be transformed by a billion people doing one thing than by one person trying to do a
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Will we choose to be people of Love? And if so, what does it mean for us to fall in love with the world, put it on our back, and carry it higher?
wellness is a sense of balance and peace in your entire being.
Wells fill up from the inside out, from the bottom up, receiving from a deep, life-giving spring.
