To Give Your All

Sometimes without your consent, your life cracks into a hundred little pieces, leaving you with nothing left to do but sweep up the shards and try not to think about anything else but the very second you're living and the task before you. 

You report your losses when asked without pity or emotion because you know that yours pale in comparison to others you have known.  Compassion is something you traded in for commitment long ago, and so you do your work and you offer your best without fanfare or ego.

This is what is said without saying, and I understand but not from experience.  My way is to pick up my pieces and belabor them, to rearrange them like a thousand piece puzzle without the box, forgetting over and over again how anything fits.  My way is to broker my work like currency in exchange for privilege--the luxury of company in this catastrophe, a first row seat to a disaster where love always wins.

This is the picture the kid took of you when no one was looking, when all she could see was how kind you are, even when you saw her sad, even when you do the only thing left you know how to do--to give your all.



Where Chelsea Stands

One of the things I can never get over in my travels in East Africa is how loved the children are.  I grew up on images of kids covered in flies in need of missionaries and salvation, only to arrive on the continent a lifetime later and find that the only person in need of redemption was myself.

This week on a last minute quiet trip to East Africa, I spent hours and hours in a very congested city, talking to my very savvy driver Rogers.  No one will develop you, he told me, without wanting something in return.  And I knew it was true for me most especially.  For every good thing I have done in Africa, there is a deep and dark demand, a desperate longing to be folded into the togetherness for which I have no birthright. 

I did not survive the genocide, Innocent once told me, to be confused about money and love. 

But still I don't understand.  I'm still buying my way into the place where Chelsea stands, secure in the knowing she can never be alone.  I'm still hoping something will make that place inside a strong embrace the place I deserve to land, simply because I am, simply because it was always meant to be.