It took a bug to start it.

A red ant to fly into my eye and burned so bad that I needed to run to the bathroom to wash it out. Then the tears slipping out from the sting turned into sobs that I didn’t understand.
With my girls all blowing air on my eye because they didn’t want it to hurt, with Manley crying my name over and over until I came inside to hold him because his stomach hurt, with picking up a crying three year old to figure out what was wrong and getting poop all over my arms, with my incredible friend getting here and having two worlds clash, with getting to watch my kids eat a pile of food for Christmas, with

Creole feeling familiar and America sounding foreign…
        It finally happened and I broke for the first time.
        So I just sat there in the darkness by the smelly toilet, shining my flashlight on the cockroach scuttling across the floor in front of me, feeling beaten from the burning in my eye, the ringworm on my leg, the bee sting on my foot, the bug bites on my body.
                And then I hear knocking on the bathroom door and a rush of voices calling for me.

                “Cot-nee ba m’ ti dlo!”
                “Cot-nee pote m’!”

                “Courtney give me some water!”
                “Courtney pick me up!”

And somehow that’s all it took. My kids calling me, my kids needing me. Because for them? I’ll go through every bee sting, every case of ringworm, every foul mess to clean up.

And for Jesus, I’m finding out that I am willing to go through anything. To reach His character. To see more of Him.

I have come to expect to have those days, the days where I am just tired and am aching for some alone time.
I have also come to expect the unexpected, as cliché as that must sound. One day I’ll be on one motorcycle with five other people on our way to the hospital and the next I’ll be getting a karate lesson from a black belt master. One day I’ll be talking about ministry with a two-time Olympian and the next I’m waiting on a side of a mountain because the

radiator in our car overheated. One day I’ll come home to find we have no water and I have to carry a 5 gallon jug a quarter mile back to the orphanage, and the next I have to hold my two year old after she gets attacked by a chicken.

I expect Jesus. I wake up in the morning and expect to see Him everywhere, where He is familiar and where He is not.

And I do.

Sometimes it feels like He is moving so vastly that I can hardly behold what He is doing. Sometimes I feel so close, so close to God’s heart that I can almost hear it beating if I stay still for long enough.

“Heart of my own heart.”

God is love, and I’ve been overcome by God, and overcome by love. Love has taken over. It has taken control of my reactions, my choices, my thoughts. It has chains on my wrists and freedom in its chains.

There have been big movements happening in my soul. Sometimes I feel like God is moving in so quickly, that I feel like a sailor, emptying out his sinking boat, bucket by bucket. And that is me. Emptying out my heart with every bucket. My pride. My selfishness. My bitterness. My plans. The things that I hold so fast to. Sin by sin, idol by idol, bucket by bucket.

There are so many times where I feel like I’m saying, “I see you God. I know what you are doing and I will let you do it. I will let you change me.” He attacks my sin where it hides deepest, exposes my idols where they clothe themselves under “okay” labels. It’s painful. And it’s good. And I need more buckets.

With the pounds of iniquity God is throwing out of my heart, I am finding big spaces that He is filling up with Himself, and with dreams and hopes that are full of light. Dreams that plan big change for the lives of these children, hopes that make a way for me to learn all that I long to, and serve where I long for. I am a dreamer, and I am a planner, and with the two I can get so lost in my own thoughts, that I end up staying inside my head and miss out on all that is happening before me right now. But as much as I am dreaming, I find that all my dreaming and planning and hoping comes down to real moments that have come along simply by living life here.

Moments where Yvenante and I are dangling our legs over our broken pool and share a bowl of rice and hot fish sauce under the moon. Moments where my oldest boy and I, go search for ripe coconuts and he tells me how he watched his father die when he was only four years old. Moments where my friend and I are brought together at the airport by strangers because we are the only white people around that could possibly be squealing at the sight of one another. Moments where I have to unplug the toilet with a pencil and can’t seem to stop laughing. Moments where I have full conversations in another language and don’t realize it until it ends. Moments where one of my girls pushes her way towards me saying, “Eskize, eskize, m’ bezwen di manman m’ bonnwit!” (“Excuse me, excuse me, I need to tell my mom goodnight!”)

As big as my dreams may get, these are the moments that I long for my life to always be full of, moments where God is felt deepest, and where His voice is heard clearest.

“When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” (John 10:4-5)

He has come before me. He has nudged me gently, pulled me heartily, invited me softly, chased after me. And to His voice I listen, because it’s the only voice I know.