/ 5th Yunnan trip
5 visits in 3 years, 1 continuous reflection: What is poverty?
2016 | The priceable cannot cause true poverty. The lack of love, trust, self-esteem, etc starves us much more than the lack of food. We suffer not the unawareness of what’s important, but the great exhaustion of failing to invest well in each dimension of life, the powerlessness of “no choice”.
2017 | Poverty is owning the God-given powers yet still feeling extremely powerless emotionally and spiritually. Ownership doesn’t release us, taking possession of what we own does.
This is the chain story: a girl gets married at 12, gives birth at 13, runs away at 18, leaving a few more left-behind children. Hello, deja vu! One layer of brokenness creates another layer of poverty.
The thorny environment pressures the children to find a way out themselves. The disbelieving society accepts only one way to success — fight for yourself, however much you suffer. Drug dealing puts up its biggest smile, sex industry gives the warmest hug. All, in the name of love, where the deepest hunger lays.
A parentless child at age 12 faces enormous pressure and great temptations. How easy to embrace temptations to alleviate the emotional poverty which would strip them even poorer than before. For a girl who’s never felt loved, how does she respond to a trafficker who appears to be a “boyfriend”, the only one who “cares”?
Are they just so spinelessly vulnerable to love? Are WE not?
The lack of healthy love experience is causing huge poverty. Providing only material stuff is like calling them to a bloody battle with no allies, only food. The heart is the barren soil. We plant and plant, how can hope grow under the wildest “weather”?
Back to where the heart for missions was born. Back to the heart of missions.
Never in my life have I felt so rich. I have no job, no money, no home to myself, but I know who has promised the abundance. HE has freed me to feel and to love, richly. The compassion becomes personal. Because I was just as poor. I want love just as much. The gospel becomes personal. Because I live out the healing possibilities as a healed person. I identify with the broken, in their needs, I find my responsibility.
Just joyfully keep on planting hope, in love, by faith.
We plant, HE grows.
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