A glimpse

Book Bus is always fun. I enjoy meeting new people and seeing familiar faces and having little chats with people of all ages about what they like to read or why they have never liked to read. It is intriguing and insightful and interesting to hear people's stories.

But then there is always at least a moment, a glimpse into the brokenness and the hurting and the poverty. Mother Theresa is credited for having said "The most terrible kind of poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved." Sometimes when you are bent over a crate of books with a child you notice their hands are too dirty, and you wonder if they feel ignored. Or sometimes you find yourself talking to a grown man who says something that is inappropriate and you wonder how long it has been since he's had an honest and trully intimate conversation with anyone.

I've been hesitant to write about much of the brokenness we have seen, because I don't want to give a stereotype to a whole neighborhood. I don't want to cast judgement on a single person. We don't know any of our new friends well enough to know how they got where they are. And not everyone we meet is living in poverty.

The thing is...when we go to High Ridge for a Book Bus trip or anything else, it seems like the things of life are just magnified there. Love and Joy and Connection seem grander, and hurt and hate and pain seem bigger.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the bad, painful things in this life. I'm a fixer, and I'd like to make it better for everyone. What I have to remember, though, is that isn't really my job. My job is to do the little, tiny things that God asks me to do...pack up some books, listen to people talk, pray...and trust that somehow God will use those tiny little things in his big, grand scheme of redemption.

There are just days when I wish I got more glimpses of redemption than brokenness, and today is one of those days.