Thoughts Prior to Leaving For Africa

In the early morning hours, as I (Brooks) still lay in bed, the familiar knot started to swell in my stomach as I started thinking about our upcoming trip to Africa.  Was it fear?   Going into the Congo is kind of scary. Was it anxiety?  Lots to do and lots on my mind.  Was it sadness to be leaving home?  Always hate to say good-bye, especially to my kids.  I was actually trying to figure it out.  What was going on with me?  Typically, a few weeks away from going on a big overseas trip, I’m pretty excited—stressed, oh yeah, sure.  There’s always the yellow legal pad with the various lists on it:  one labeled: work stuff, another: shopping yet to do, which always includes yet one more trip to Walmart; another: miscellaneous items like washing the dog, get medications and so on.  I had my yellow pad and I had all my lists and my calendar was pretty well filled up til the minute we leave, but no, none of that was what was causing the pain in the pit of my stomach. You know how you burned your finger once and then you burn it again…then you think to yourself, “Wow, this hurts -- just like the last time.”  Then you remember exactly what was going on when you burned it before.  Well, that’s what happened when I started feeling this pain.  It wasn’t like other pain, like oh, my daughter’s been hurt, or I’m in a scary situation, but it most definitely was like pain I had felt before. I started to see pictures, like a movie of all the many places we have been, like the Philippines and Thailand, Laos, Madagascar and South Africa.  These are places I don’t think about much as I go in and out of my every day life, but they are very real places, filled with very real people.  Sure, there are lots of people there who are living the good life, I suppose, although I’ve not met them or seen them.  But what I have seen are the poor, the desperate, the destitute.  I’ve seen the hungry, the lonely, the hopelessly abandoned and forgotten.  The heartbreak of the cries and the filthy stench of poverty are overwhelming.  This was the feeling I had come to know from previous trips.  Could I do it again?  Could I face the realities of going into these developing countries and the people who are trying to literally survive in them? Help!  I must brace myself for what I know is coming.  It’s going to be awful; it’s going to be heinous and horrible, and I can do nothing to help, to meet the needs.  There are simply so many—everywhere.  But then, I began to breathe again.  One breath, then two, then three, and I heard in my spirit.  Just one.  You can speak to just one.  You can love just one.  I was just One.  Jesus impacted the entire world and He was just One. --Brooks