It had been a long day of teaching English when I received the late-night phone call that one of the children at the orphanage in Lizon needed pain medicine. We jumped on the back of our friend’s moto and started tunneling through the dark streets of Croix-des-Mision and Lizon. All you could see in the night were the silhouettes of people in flashing headlights, and the purple-gray clouds layering over the stars.

Somewhere in the midst of a rainy season sky, and the crowded dark streets on the back of a three-person motorcycle ride, Jesus gently and yet firmly encased my heart with his love. It was like in that moment, He was reminding me of the kind of God He is, the kinds of things in which He cares about, the things that He says matters.
Because God cares about Vladimir, the boy who is hurting in the orphanage. He matters to Him. He is important and so is his pain.
Jesus breaks in and makes me realize, that in this moment, I’m making the difference. I am making someone and something which would be forgotten, a priority. That even bringing tylenol to someone late night on a motorcycle is important and worthwhile.

Sometimes it’s easy to skip over the passages where God restores a tool to an impoverished worker, or He provides a water source for a mistreated servant.

Sometimes in light of big dreams and trying to do big things that seem impressive and important, I forget that Jesus finds the smallest of things so important. Maybe I just needed some stars and a motorcycle ride to remind me, or maybe Jesus was starting to remind me of something He had been trying to change in me for a long time now.

Since March I have turned 21, and since then I have been busy. The kind of busy where you can’t even seem to find a day in your week just to breathe and process the other six days.

Teaching English classes. Making lesson plans. Advertising for the school to try and cover running costs. Trying to love 43 children in two orphanages. Trying to maintain a clean and better
environment for them to live in. Doing urban agriculture. Trying to support a family in the mountains of Zoranje. Trying to make it to the clinic each week to be an extra pair of hands.
The list goes on and on, and when there isn’t a routine, there is something else. Something else to be done, someone else to love and care for, some relationship that needs to be built. But this isn’t a post about busyness. This is a post of Jesus chasing after me in it all, and teaching me something he has been trying to instill in me for years.

When people ask me questions, I think about them long after I answer them. I am a person who has no problem with reflecting, in processing through things, in loving to take the time out of life to do so. But since moving down here, I can’t answer the questions which I have always had the answers for, the questions in which I have never been unable to respond to.

I was having a meeting with the founder of one of the NGO’s that I have been partnering with here. Out of nowhere in the conversation, which is usually how I, myself, ask questions, she asked me what my dreams are. This is usually always a hard question for people, but it never has been for me. I have always known what my dreams are. I have always had those dreams that drive me, that inspire me, that push me towards something. Dreams are what I fight for and go for and live for.
But then she asked me, and I couldn’t believe I didn’t have the answer.

It was then that I realized that all of my dreams had come true. I thought over all of my usual answers, all of the dreams I usually tell people, and realized God had already did it. He has said and answered and done. But I have never not known my dreams. And it scared me. If I didn't know my dreams, what would I be fighting for? What would I be longing for? What would I be working hardest for?
I started trying to answer her question on my own. But I started seeking the answer in the wrong voices. I have been trying to figure out the very thing in which Jesus has already told me over and over again for years. I have been listening to the lies that Jesus already had to break through more than once. Lies that if I don't go to school and get a degree, if I don't work with an organization or ministry, if I don't have a role that can be defined, then I am worthless, I am not serving effectively, that I can't do anything worthwhile. That honestly, if I didn't pursue these things, I would be dreaming for nothing.

Three months have passed since she asked me that question. Three months in which Jesus would answer me, in the simply annoying, and yet clearly beautiful way in which He does.

It started with noticing them. The unnoticed ones. The ones who had such plain suffering written in their eyes. It began on Easter when I went to the hospital to visit my friend's mother. When her eyes lit up so bright at having someone come see her. Then as we were coming out and a boy carried his father in, and then as horrid anguish quaked through his body after the doctors told him he was already gone. It started with the blind man on the street. As a woman started beating on him

because she ran into his walking stick. It started with the too tiny baby crying in the clinic, feeling the weight of his skeleton frame in my hands.
Love has been hard lately. When you choose to love, you choose to hurt. But sometimes, the hurt becomes too much and you choose to harden your heart, you choose to block the intensity of God-love from your being and all the pain that comes with it.

I've been doing it. When little children you love so impossibly still continue to remain in the same seemingly hopeless situation, after you feel the heaviness of saying goodbye to someone, and knowing you will probably never see them again, and never know if they will be okay, when you love someone so intensely, thinking God has asked you to love them forever, and instead they are suddenly taken out of your life.. God-love just hurts, hurts more than every other kind of love.

I have forgotten the dreams God has been breathing into my story because I have been shutting myself off to the sources where all of my dreams have been birthed. I have thrown up thick walls around my heart as a defense against such pain, but with losing the suffering, with losing the ache and turmoil, I have lost the love that produces wild and endless dreams for the world around me.

But Jesus never leaves me to myself.

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;

he will gather the lambs in his arms;

he will carry them in his bosom,

and gently lead those that are with young.

Isaiah 40:11

Jesus is good. But even more than that, He is endearing, He is kind. He is ever trying to prove his over-arching love to me. He is funny and affectionate and makes me feel the unspeakable depths of my heart. He has been so gently placing His hands over my messy heart, making me feel at peace,

and full of hope and promise. The promise that He is doing something beautiful out of this weird, abstract life He has led me to live.

He is faithful to the things He calls us to. And I have seen it. I have watched God being faithful, I have heard Him promise, and I have seen Him act on those promises.

There have been so many unfathomably beautiful things that He has made happen since we have been here. One of them is watching Him use the friendships we have built for something that has made my being rejoice in. Suddenly our Haitian friends are helping us scrub the fecies and grime from the orphanage rooms. It is my friend

Yvenante who is braiding all of the little girls hair and bringing them snacks. It is our motorcycle driver who spends money out of his own pocket for the family we are helping in the mountains.

This guy came to the English school one day looking for my friend. I heard his American accent and we got to talking, and he told me he had to come back to Haiti, that he got into drugs and ruined his life.
I told him you can never ruin your life, that it can always be restored. And I so desperately wanted him to believe it, for him to have hope again, for him to know Jesus, and to feel all of the good that He gives us.

It was this weird, washing-over kind of feeling that ran into my spirit and somehow, this short encounter with this man made me remember. Made me remember who I am, who Jesus is trying to make me to be.

Someone who deeply and desperately cares about that one person who everyone has probably given up on already. Someone who holds the baby no one else notices. Someone who fights for the orphan living in a place of corruption. Someone who comes alongside of the single mother trying to find a way for a future.
I get so caught up in what the world tells me I need to be, and what I need to have. I have felt so smothered by so many voices pushing and saying and implying that without a specific role, a trade, a degree, something you’re really knowledgable in and super passionate about….that really, you aren’t useful.
It makes me feel not important, not helpful. It makes me feel embarrassed, and really, just pretty worthless.
I have wanted and still want these things though. I have wanted to be really good at something, or really passionate about something. I wanted Courtney to be good at agriculture or leading worship or helping medically or fixing things. I have so wanted that, but that’s not who God has been making me to be, what He has been writing and forming me to be.

I hate that I constantly try to form my own heart. I try to shove desires in there. Try to hate what I love, try to love things that I only like. I keep trying to change the person God keeps changing me into. I fight Him.
But I want Him to win.

I want to be passionate about the things God has been pressing into my heart. I want to be humble. I want Jesus and Jesus alone to define who I am and my role in His kingdom. I want to stop caring about my life so much, and I want to care about that one other person. I want to stop, always. On the street, in the orphanage, in the school, in my home, in the mountains.
I just want to care. I want to love, and I want my soul to rest in knowing that as wildly undefined as those things are, that this is who I am, these are my dreams, and that it is enough.