Grateful

Although I've spent most of my life running from suffering (and what American hasn't?), I find that I cannot keep it up anymore. My breath is ragged and my legs are so tired. People here walk down dusty roads, quietly sharing their path with death. They don't hold its hand, of course, but they don't shoo it away either. And it's everywhere--this inevitability, this end to our short time here.

And if not death, exactly, then slow, simmering life. People who lose babies and go on living (like my cousins in the U.S.). People here who live eye-level with my knees on streets packed with refuse. Kids who pick through trash, unaware of the picture they paint. Legs like brittle sticks, eyes that know too much.

And then more "ordinary" griefs--like the one I crashed into today. I looked into the eyes of a mother who had lost her only son in a car accident in America. I had never met her before. But as I looked into her wild brown eyes--sweet, awkward relief--I was able to cry from my heart for her pain. She, wordless and searching, and I, small and negligible in this sea of humans. We were tied together.

And I was given the strange gift of seeing that my little offering of a crumpled face and streaming tears--without so much as an embrace--lifted a cloud off of her for a moment. She was glad someone else could see in for a minute, I guess.

Maybe God is giving me a ministry of tears. I've cried often enough during my time in India. I don't know. It's a painful thing, this life. But I'm finding out that pressing into it, and into the One who can heal it, is better than running after all.