ok, i mean it this time: WHAT. A. DAY.

There are times I get so exasperated with God because He holds us to Higher standards. It's frustrated me to tears at points in my life, but He set and abided those standards first--and His standard for love was one of incarnational suffering. Listen and observe as I learn this.

Today during our midday break at the orphanage we walked out into the slums to buy some fruit. I purchased a whole mango. Yummy. On our way back into the orphanage compound we were crossing over a muddy area on the side of the road. There was a narrow wooden board acting as a makeshift bridge and I was making my way across when some Kenyans began walking across too from the other direction. My thought was to step aside to make room for them--but I really couldn't have been really thinking, because if I had, I would have realized the narrow slat of wood I was treading on only allows for one person. As it were, my foot, seemingly of its own accord, stepped off the board. It went--spelunk!--into the slum sewage and my other foot followed suit in an automatic, unconscious attempt to maintain balance.

There--God had done it again: pushed me past my self-imposed limits. I stood for a moment, in shocked incomprehension, past my ankles in black/grey/brown sewage before I pulled my feet out. My legs, emerged, looking like I had just slid on a pair of slum sewage socks, glistening and slick with sludge. He asked me, in that moment, how far I was willing to go to love His children. To identify with them. He hadn't just sent me to Huruma, He had sent me to be in it. To stand in the muck and disgustingness of it all, just as He did when He came to earth. It's not enough, Denise, He said, for you just to pass to and fro this place. I'm asking you to be in this place--and you are going to do it by My standards, not yours.

And I learned that for those whom much is asked of, much care is provided. The mamas were all resting as I stumped into view and began to try to scrape the sewage off of me. They took one look at me in my shell-shocked glory and immediately gathered themselves into action. They took my shoes and scrubbed them cleaner than they had been before. They brought a bucket and washed my shamefully unshaven legs and muddied feet. All the while, they were talking to me and smiling at me, affable and comforting.

They were all so kind. And they didn't have to be--they don't owe me anything. I'm just a random volunteer girl making a mess. I don't deserve their care, but they lavished it on me. No matter how far God pushes me, His graces always abounds infinitely more because He pushes me out of my fallible human love into His eternal one.