reminders

this morning, I have been reminded of 2 things.

1. God's mercies are new every morning.
Today, I feel energized and excited for what lies ahead. I really feel that this weekend is a turning point for me in many ways. . .I am submitting my residency applications, my journal article from my public health internship is being submitted (finally bringing that to a complete close), and tommorrow I start a consult psychiatry elective at UNC, finally bringing to an end the grace-filled-but-chaotic journey of the past few months (Roanoke Rapids! Step 2! Puerto Rico! Residency apps!). I feel like now I am 'settling back down' into a more stable and predictable life for a while. And as much as I like to have fun, I think those who know me well know that I really do crave stability and predictability.

2. I have a passion and calling to help those in need.
Going through letters and bills this morning, I was brought to tears by a letter from World Vision, a Christian organization whose work I strongly support. The story of a 29 year old Haitian woman offering her child to a stranger in exchange for food for her other children was just too much to take.

Only 3 months after the end of my classes in Maternal and Child Health, I fear that I have grown numb to one of my key passions in life. For too many years I have felt paralyzed, too far removed from dire need to really do anything about it. That sense of frustration only grew as a Master’s student in Public Health, studying human suffering from the ivory tower.

Don’t get me wrong- I need to study. I need to be patient, to apply myself to the work in front of me, trusting the Lord that He is slowly preparing me to be able to be greatly used someday for His work to ‘bring good tidings to the afflicted . . .to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives’.

But it’s SO easy to slip from passionate patience into apathy. To slip from ‘I care deeply about this but am quietly waiting for my time of ministry to come’, to ‘Maybe I don’t really care so much. Maybe my wardrobe and my feelings and my little details of life are the most important things in the world’.

So this morning, I was glad for the reminder. Glad to remember that I am ANGRY- bitterly angry- at the injustices of the world in which we live. Glad to remember that Christ’s heart is breaking every day for His children in need. And glad to remember that even in my apathy, He is a forgiving and gracious God. And he is a God who, with or without me, is very much at work in our world, making ‘a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert’.