March 2009
www.allisonfamilyinguat.blogspot.com
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6
One of my (Lori’s) favorite things to do in Guatemala is to go on housecalls. Normally, my role here is more of a “support” or a “behind the scenes” role. When I get to tag along on housecalls, I actually get to be with the people. I don’t add any value medically but I love to see the people and how they live. If you are keeping up with our blog, you know that we went on a housecall recently. We went to see a young woman who had a baby six weeks prior. She wasn’t able to walk and she thought she didn’t have enough breastmilk. (See our blog entry from March 15th for more information.) We had to walk quite a distance up a mountain and then down again to get to their house. When we rounded the corner of the house, we saw many little children. My first thought was “they are so cute and . . . so dirty”. Now we are not afraid of a little dirt at our house. My children get dirty with the best of them but this was the kind of dirt that comes from not having water in plentiful supply. As I looked around the house and then into it, I noticed that their floor was dirt which is very common here. Their house was adobe so it was made of dirt. Of course, the children were dirty with a deep down kind of dirt.
I feel like the Lord has been cleaning our “deep, down dirt” for the past 6 months. It feels like He has been scrubbing us clean and stripping off the things that we are trying to cover ourselves with. We have had to walk through some difficult times in the past six months: our computer crashing, Don losing his driver’s license and credit card, losing Caleb’s glasses, our clutch going out and Hannah’s broken wrist - to name a few. Peter Scazzero in Emotionally Healthy Spiritually puts it this way: “He (God) has a unique purpose for each of us, knowing how much there is to cleanse out of our inner being, and how much he wants to infuse of himself into us for his great, long-term purposes. Our Father knows how much we can handle.” There were many times when I felt like He had given us more than we could handle, yet we feel that we are stronger because of all of these trials. We have also had to learn what it means to trust the Lord and lean on Him at a deeper level than we ever had before. We are now in the process of trying to “see” what the Lord has next for us, but we don’t want to miss what He has for us today. We don’t want to look too far forward and miss what He has for us in the four weeks we have left. We also want to wait on Him and His plan. This is all part of trusting Him.
During the housecall, while the others were inside the house examining the patient and the baby, I was outside playing with the “dirty” kids. I asked if I could take their picture and then showed it to them on the camera. They just giggled when they saw themselves. I am pretty sure that they weren’t thinking “look at how dirty I am!” Often we can’t see our own “dirt” either! The kids would try to look so solemn while I took the picture and then break into giggles and smiles after. The only time I noticed their dirt was when we first arrived. After that initial thought, I only noticed how cute their smiles and giggles were, how sweet they were and how much fun it was to make them laugh. I didn’t add a lot of value to the housecall that day except to make some kids laugh. It brightened my day; I pray that it brightened theirs as well.
Check our blog for the adventures that the Lord has for us during our last 4 weeks. -The Allison’s
