There is a tangible tension in the air and it will come during different times throughout the day. Sometimes it will happen when I open the refrigerator and there are too many options to choose from. It recently became too overwhelming to continue unpacking boxes that have been sitting in my new room all year. I feel like a square trying to fit inside of a circle and it hurts.
Here, the supply is constant and the demand is high; it’s so easy to want more. The next i-product, best car, piece of clothing, the list goes on. When did wanting more when we already have so much excess become normal?
I just got back from a yearlong trip called the World Race that challenged me and 38 other individuals to live on roughly four to six dollars per day for 11 months. In most cases, it was easy to keep within that budget. On off days, we were able to spend a little more on something special, but that always came out of our own spending money if we personally needed it. In most cases, I found that I was full and satisfied after eating what we could on budget.
It was in the normalcy of living with less for so long and returning to excess where the tension arose. This is a tension I didn’t even realize I was learning and feeling throughout the race until I got home. I now recognize the beauty of a nice home I always took for granted before leaving. I'm exploring my small corner of the world with a completely new perspective of gratitude now.
I don’t feel poor. I just feel the weight of what five dollars can buy for an African family living in the slums for a week. I think that makes me richer than money ever could. What I spent on my first Starbucks drink back in the states could have fed a malnourished Ugandan girl and her siblings who have been abandoned by their mother for a week. I can’t ignore the fact that these things are happening across the world now. I have lived and felt it in the depths of my heart. In the same way, I can’t choose to ignore what’s been happening in America because I live in it now. I feel the weight. Furthermore, I don’t want to peel my eyes away. I want to do something about it and I don't want to fall into complacency.
None of it is wrong; it’s just different. There is a learning curve to every time of transition and I have been living in transition for the past year. Every time I felt myself getting comfortable, we’d leave and be onto the next culture, ministry, and lesson God was onion-folding into the depths of my heart. The things I've seen hold weight I can't begin to express in words.
It's not a bad weight to carry by any means. There are things that carry more significance to me now that I have circumnavigated the globe. I was graced with the eyes to see, gift to feel, and ability to bridge understanding and connection between the differences in this world through my writing and being.
The truth is that life happens everywhere and we can’t just ignore that by numbing away the pain and weight of this world’s brokenness. We need to feel it and we need to accept it wherever we happen to find ourselves in life. Whether it’s in another country or the midst of our own backyard, we need to live glorifying God with our gifts. It’s the in between season of tension where the urgency to share the gospel becomes real.
That is the weight the Lord calls us to carry. Living alive and in between is the cost of following the Lord and bringing kingdom wherever He calls us. It could be in America, it could be in a third world country, but wherever He calls is where we are called to bring our best foot forward. Whether we're rich or poor doesn’t matter because it’s not a matter of what we have or what we own. At the end of the day, it’s really just a simple matter of the heart.
