Swaziland: Take Two

Well, I'm at it again. In just about a month I will be headed back to the place that still holds a piece of my heart from last summer. This time I get to stay for three months! I am so incredibly excited and so incredibly terrified! This time I will be with a group of college students working with a local pastor at different care points to minister to orphans who come our way. We will get to love on them, provide them with food, and help educate them. THAT is the exciting part. The scary part is that the other part of our ministry involves going on home visits to people who are in the last stages of AIDS. I recently read some of the blogs of people who have been on the trip previously and they said that these home visits are extremely difficult, but also extremely rewarding. Basically we will go into the homes of people who are literally on their death beds and do whatever it is that God wants us to do for his precious child. Whether that be to hold their hand, sing a song, or just sit and talk so that they know they are not alone...I am up for the challenge. The scary part is that I have been in that position before...twice actually. I came home from school every day for about 2 months when I was 16 to watch the strongest man I ever knew fight a losing battle with cancer. I know what it is like to stare at someone's chest for hours and pray that I will see it rise and fall with new breath. I know how to tell when death is coming from looking at someone's fingernails. I can also still hear the echo of what the hospice nurses called the "death rattle." My Papa loved me....on the night that he found out his cancer was terminal, his mind was on his girls (my sister and I) I heard a quote once that I feel is applicable to what went on in his mind that night.

"Oh dry the glistening tear that dews that marshal cheek. Thy loving children here in them thy comfort seek. With sympathetic care, their arms around thee creep. For oh they cannot bear to see their father weep." -The Pirates of Penzance

I loved my Papa. He made my world safe...and when he left, the monsters of life came. That is why I am afraid of going on the home visits. I'm going to be face to face with death again. I am going to see its sights, smell its smells, and hear its sounds. But maybe that is it....God allowed me to go through that so that now I can have the courage to go through this. It won't be a foreign thing. God chooses us to be his hands and feet....and with those hands and feet he wants us to tend to his sheep. If God chooses me to be his hands and feet that can bring comfort to those I come into contact with in Swaziland, then that will be an honor that I can never comprehend. We MUST remember that he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world!!!

"...If you only knew the greatness inside you. You must trust me; I will draw out of you what the world needs to see. Here is your gift. Use it wisely..."