When Your Heart Breaks

The heat settles in for VBS week.  It always does.  With forecasts nearing 100 each day and humidity rising, we spend our days hopping from air conditioned homes to air conditioned cars to air conditioned restaurants and stores to an evening in an air conditioned church for VBS.  Avoiding the sweltering temperatures and shielding ourselves from the blazing sun, we huff and puff, complaining with cutting tongues about the injustice of mercury rising, as if we don't deserve the suffering of sweat.

Smiling children filed into the church's gym, knowing the hours of laughter and enjoyment awaiting them.  Some were regular church attendees, but some were experiencing church for the first time.  I heard it in their comments.  They remarked about a teaching, or the building, or particular songs.  We prayed for all their hearts to be touched, but perhaps it was mine which was broken.

Every year, an offering is taken.  Last year, it was shoes for an orphanage in Zambia, which is apparently one of the five poorest countries in the world. We watched videos of the latest missionary trip and saw the children's faces. Our hearts pained, and we gave.

This year, the offering is for Operation Christmas Child.  Collecting now for the shoe boxes to be packed this autumn.  It is a Christmas in July of sorts. We watched another video. {Oh, the visual of the video, it tears at my heart!} This one was of Ralph, who lives in Imus Cavite, Philippines. My eyes swelled with tears as I watched his community, including his family, pick through trash to sell.  Would it make sense to say he lives in surroundings below poverty?  To think, this boy half a world away, lives in squander as I spent the day complaining about the heat even though I spent the day in air conditioning. 

If you have a few moments, then please watch this video.  His response of gratitude for a small shoebox of gifts is humbling, and you can see for yourself why my heart broke for him and others like him who live with so little, but have hearts filled with such gratitude.
~ Dorie