Things That I Know

It's a Friday, and I am so thankful for the weekend! It's been a great week, but I think I was starting to get a little sick towards the end. My nose is sniffy and stuffy, I cough a little, and I'm tired. But I think I will have good oppurtunities to rest this weekend.

Today at 5:30, I'm getting together with three of my best girl friends to pray together. These are the three who sat down to pray with me the evening Lance went into surgery, altho we ended up praying for so much more than Lance. We decided that was a precious time, of lifting each other up before the Father, so we've agreed to meet and pray for each other each week. One of these girls has a fiancee` in Iraq; he's in the Marines, fighting for our country. The other night she was given word that the convoy he was in had been hit, and there were several Marines dead. I can't imagine the agony of those hours before she knew he was ok. There are some things that can only be taken to the Father, for otherwise we would not know what to do with them; and some things can tear you up inside if left unsaid.

There is a grad student, Marnie, at my college here who I grew up with in Indonesia; we were homeschooled in the same old seminary building, I in first grade and she in fifth. She wrote a poem that reminded me so much of "home" that it made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And, again, I was reminded of "home" when I read on the blog of a YWAMer that he was thinking of going to a city in Malaysia, the city where I lived and where my parents still are. I love Texas, but the things I "know" the most are still in Asia...and it is home. The people there are my people, and my prayer is to go back to them someday...for many of them still live in hopeless darkness, and it breaks my heart. In another poem Marnie wrote, she writes of these people:

old women walked barefoot
over tar-stained roads, carrying fruit baskets
and hungry children. Young men sat smoking,
playing guitars whose music blended with the
loud chaos of traffic. Naked children ran
with paper kites on fishing line, tugging against
the wind, laughing at small miracles.

Those are the people I love, the people God loves. As He weeps for those still living in darkness, do we take the time from our busy lives to even notice their existence? I pray that we would notice, and then do oh so much more than that.

I want to close with Marnie's poem; read it carefully, for it is a snapshot of the home I love:

Things That I Know

The smell of a monsoon rain,
the pressing silence after.
The sound of wind in a bamboo thicket,
the thick cold of mud that settles
between toes in a rice paddy
in the long season of rain.

I know how to climb a coconut tree
with my bare hands and feet.
What noise a rhinoceros beetle makes,
rattling angry in the matted grass.
Sweat that radiates from the body
at 105 degrees, mid-October sun
in my window, glaring.

A place where the earth melts away
in the stillness of dawn, where shadows
stretch long in a sandy crater as the red sun
creeps over the volcano's edge,
pouring into the barren mountain
like lava.

I know the voice of the Indian Ocean
calling out in the dark to all the distant shores
it may never touch, the heavy water
turning itself at the edges,
pulling over glistening beaches,
reaching again toward the deep.