Lesson Learned?

For so long, I thought I was stripped of everything I knew, of my very home...but I have been learning something lately- that that isn't the case. 

Sure, my days aren't spent beneath the Mexican sun- loving on babies, holding things loosely, and reveling in Spanglish. 

Sure, I'm not there, but God's telling me that I don't have to be. 

He's telling me that wise-old saying, written years before I ever came to be, 

"For such a time as this, Daughter."

He's whispering that I can love here. I can love now. 

Our hearts have the truest, purest ability of being in many places at once. 

Take my two jobs for instance: being spent in the classroom with my students, and then falling back into place with my regulars at the Goodwill. 

I used to ignore life stateside. I didn't think that there was worth to this other life I lived.

But why is it we forsake the mundane; we refuse it to be our ministry?

Why is it that we beg to differ that we are where we are for a reason? 

We think love is only required in the grand scheme of things. 
We think it must come easy, that it must be requited. 
We think we are only being used when we are lost in our dreams, caught up in our purpose. 

But what are you fighting for, and more importantly, what is being overshadowed?
Why are you refusing to be used, right where you are?

There are people to love here, aren't there?

There are moments that become shadowed, by our own mere refusal to let them be seen. 

I am here for the students that need a little extra attention, to sit beside them and spell things out a little more clearly- attaching them to their memory. I am here for the students that get distracted and fight to be known. 

I am just as here for the regulars that come in at night, pouring themselves out to me. The grandmothers that are taken advantage of, the children that I've watched grow up before my very eyes. I am here for the ones that come in for company on a nightly basis- afraid to go home alone.

I am to be love to them, each and every last one. 

I know this comes as a broken record. 

How many times can these words fall from my heart and down to my typing fingers? 

But I guess sometimes the lessons we need to learn the most, are the ones that God continues to rain down upon us incessantly. 

Just as we stubbornly refuse to get out of bed on the hard days, our God stubbornly refuses to give up on us. 

He keeps teaching. He enters in. He makes Himself known. 

He sends a child into your store asking for a Bible, because her grandmother's heart is just too heavy. 
He sends a student into your classroom, because they are always written off as the jokester. 

He sends a patient into your care, because someone chose to look the other way. 

He sends a needy heart into your life through social media, because they have seen all other friends lost with the seasons. 

These are the sent--do you see them?

They are right here. 

Refuse to believe the lie that you have to be miles away from everything you know, to be used. 

It's time to love. Love these. Love the least of these.