The Blog

It’s been over a month now since we’ve returned from Sierra Leone, Africa. And for the first time I feel ready to write something. On the plane on the way there I hoped to have my heart broken for the people there so I would be motivated and energized to continue to try to do something. I was not only broken, but completely and utterly wrecked. I can explain it best through the words of the Lifehouse song “Broken”. “I’m falling apart, barely breathing with a broken heart that’s still beating…”

People keep asking if I’ve adjusted back to life. And for a while I just kept saying “no yet.” But I’ve realized there is no adjusting back. Life as I know it has forever changed. I am not the same person I was before I left. I am different; I am better and worse but in a good way. What keeps going through my mind is: “its just not ok”. It’s not ok that I turn on the facet whenever I want and nearly 1 billion people can’t. It’s not ok that when my kid has an earache I’m in a doctor’s office within the hour, and most kids there have never even seen a doctor. It’s not ok that while I have an abundance of options at the grocery store 1 mile down the road, they wonder if their children will eat at all today. etc, etc.

Someone recently told me after seeing pictures from my trip that it was too depressing, that I needed to lighten up the stories. But the pictures are what they are. It’s the truth. And yes its uncomfortable and overwhelming. We can’t do it all, but we can do something. And if I do something and you so something and so on we can see change.

I have found that in becoming wrecked I have become free. Free from the burden of selfishness. Free from the insatiable hunger for material things. Free from my little existence. And full of hope that my newly wrecked life can help put the pieces back together for someone else.

Kate

“To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that is to have succeeded.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson