I was on my way to the store the other day. I got on the same tap-tap to Geral as a woman, and whom I am guessing was her son. She was impossibly skinny. Her skin and bones hugged so tightly together that I couldn't imagine blood being able to pass through. Her son was coughing, maybe from the dust, but more likely because he was pretty sick. He had the same eyes and demeanor as another boy I know. Beautiful and kind.
Before we had gotten on the tap-tap, I had watched him leading his mother through the chaotic street, gently and protectively. I watched her smile needlessly at him as we took off, as she watched with happiness as he ate the krém she had bought for less than a quarter.
I wanted to talk to them and ask them questions. Ask if they needed help. If he was sick. If she had eaten today. Where they were going.
But I didn't want to embarrass them. I didn't want to be the one to take the smiles from their faces.

But I realized that more than all the questions I wanted to ask, and things I wanted to do, I just wanted to know them. Know this boy with kind eyes who loves his mother so gingerly, know this woman who probably sacrifices most things for her son, who's love for him lies within the hum of her voice.

I started dreaming in the depths of myself, dreaming not of doing something, but of becoming someone who knows people. Someone who helps people in such a way that it breaks racial barriers. Passes social codes. That embodies the mystery of love itself, and moves people not only towards living a better life, but to seeing Jesus in the very ones besides us. I started dreaming of Jesus. I started dreaming of friendship. But I also started to feel something, a deep urging inside of me to be asking God something.

There is something deeply wonderful about loving someone simply because you choose to.
I think it is rather easy to feel compassion for a child living in an orphanage. I think it is easy to feel love for a child living in such a situation.

I don't think it is easy to continue loving them when you see no end in sight for their suffering.

When you start choosing to love them, you have to look into their suffering and love them right in the midst of it. Not when it's over. Not when they are healing. But when you know that the suffering will continue even through everything you do to love them.

You take those sick babies into your home for a while, nurse them back to health, watch them heal and breathe and smile. You watch their bloated stomachs grow smaller, their eyes become more alert, their rashes fade. And then you have to take them back to the orphanage, knowing that they will just get sick again.
You kiss away her tears, try to wish away the hollowness and hurt in her chest after she, the most hard-working, little girl you know, has just been unjustly screamed at, told she is worthless, and that she is going to be sent away. And you leave that day, knowing that as soon as you do, she will be left to take care of a newborn baby and work, still having worthless and ungrateful written all over her heart.

You listen to the sounds of his voice as he whispers to you how badly he wants to leave, how trapped he feels, and how hopeless he sounds. And all you can do is listen, knowing there is no way out for him, not now, not yet.

It's this eating away at your heart, almost can't bear it inside of you kind of love.
It's heavy and strong and too much for your body. You get to feel a piece of God run through you, get to feel a glimpse of who and how He is. You get to grasp the edges of this mad, aching, wondrous love that He has for you.
This love is deliberate. It sacrifices and suffers and chooses what is right. This love, it's kind. It is softly spoken. It is lovely. Warm. This love is choosing what's best for them and not you. This love is selfless. It makes you ache until you are removed entirely, and all there is, is this wanting for goodness in their lives.

He kindly wrapped that withered hand in His palms. He spoke tenderly to the leper. He ached and cried out for Jerusalem. He suffered and sacrificed everything He had because of the unbearable love in Him. Dying wasn't best for Jesus. But he so longed for goodness for us that He did.

I guess I never knew that faith is so tied up in love. That you can't have faith unless you love. That your faith can't be more unless you love more. "And if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Cor. 13:2 I have been asking for months and months for more faith, for him to increase my faith, when really, I can't have more faith without more love.

I feel like there is much that is unknown for the future, of what exactly God will do next, of what exactly it is that He is asking of me.

But I think of Nickenson, of Dada, of Mackenson, and I can't help but realize that Jesus hasn't asked or pressured me to become a person who accomplishes sizable things or does something big or great. He hasn't created me to be that person. He's created me to love, Him and my neighbor. He tells us exactly how to love Him. By loving others. When Jesus asks Peter over and over if he loves Him, He tells him to feed his sheep. Near the end of Matthew, Jesus talks about how when we love someone in need, who's naked, hungry, sick, in prison...we are really loving Jesus himself.

I think God has been urging me to ask for more faith because of how unsure I have been feeling about the future. He's been telling me to ask for faith to make me realize that all of my decisions and choices I'm going to make for my future, should be for, and to love other people.
He's been urging me to ask for faith so that I would love more. And that by loving more, I would have more faith.

I think that is why I feel that friendship is so important. Friendship makes it impossible to walk away. I can walk away from my student, walk away from a child in an orphanage, walk away from a co-worker. But not when they are my friends. Friendship drags you into the kind of love that Jesus so longs for us to have for other people. It's the kind of love that won't let you walk away. It's the aching kind. The deliberate kind.
Friendship does not only allow me to know people, it allows me to know God more. And I guess that's it really. To know God. To hear him speak, to watch Him do something incredible, to see Him move every time the world around you changes a little. Knowing God, I think that's all that most of us want. It's what I want.