Just don't get to attached!

I found out on Sunday that one of my twelve year old girls was hospitalized and had passed out and the doctors did not know why. I was a mess; I was on my way to my parents after an exhausting weekend and felt completely done, finished with and ready to sleep for days till everything passed. In the process of someone trying to cheer me up their advice to me was to just not get so attached.

I work with families and kids in a community in Rexdale. They don’t have much; their lives are filled with fathers who leave gangs, drugs, guns and shootings. Run down government housing homes and lack of respect, care, love, safety and hope. I go in there to earn their trust, build relationships, to show them I care and value them. So show them their value and most of all to show them the hope that we can all have in Jesus Christ if only we accept His love in our lives.

But it’s not all easy. It’s hard being away from my family and my friends. It’s hard that the people closest to me don’t understand what I do or how much it means to me or how much it can affect me at times. It is hard being absent from so many events and things I’d love to be at. It’s not easy always missing someone or something. It means there are times when I will be very lonely and like I am doing everything on my own because there is no one around to support me.

 It is also not always easy building relationships in the community that I work it, it takes a lot of hard work and times to establish a relationship with someone who isn’t used to anyone caring about who they are. It takes a lot to earn some ones trust and respect when all they know is people letting them down. It means really investing, caring and valuing someone who may have little regard for you. It means being disappointed when they don’t respond the way I’d like to them and hurts when they lash out in anger because of the injustice of their own lives. And it means tears and pain when I know one of my little girls is in the hospital and I can’t be there with her and I don’t know how she is doing. It also means I will have a burden and a heavy heart knowing that she doesn’t yet know the Lord.  

But it’s a mission field. I am only an hour away from my “home” and not even that far from my “home church”, but in another sense I couldn’t be farther away. The lifestyle in Rexdale could not be more different then my parents’ home in Utopia. It feels like another world so far away from my family and friends. It’s my other life, my sisters in South Africa and that is far away distance wise, I am not that far away physically but I may as well be.  The worlds don’t mesh to well together; I can’t be fully in my old life and fully in my ministry. It’s not a part time thing and it’s not a 9-5 job. I don’t have the weekends “off” to enjoy the freedom of weekends. Relationships and ministry is a full time occupation. If I am not there and if I am not attached then I may as well just not be there. I often hear comments from people at my church or my neighbor like “it’s been so long” or “where have you been”, or “you don’t come to church to often anymore”.  I hear these things and often grow burdened and discouraged, I can’t be everywhere. I wish I could I really do but I can’t. I can’t be fully involved in building relationships and loving a community if I am never there, or if I leave every chance I get. That isn’t how you love or care for someone.

I need to be attached, I need to be involved, and I need to invest. That doesn’t mean that I will forget everything else and will completely disappear off the face of the earth. It just means that I can’t be around as much as I’d like and that is okay. Because I am doing what I love and what I am supposed to be doing.  But I need people behind me in this, I know what I am doing is kind of weird and isn’t the “normal” thing to do, but I desperately want my friends and family to understand what I am doing and why I am doing it because I need their support. I need to be encouraged through words and hugs and affirmation, I need to be built up and prayed for. I need to be support by my family, friends and church community even if I am absent as a missionary in a third world country, what if I was!