Beautiful Brokenness.

Why? I feel like this is a common thing that people ask all the time. Why? Why do I have to wash the dishes? Why do I have to go to that class? Why do I have to ride my bike to work today? It can also be a common thing that we ask in our walk with the Lord. God why did you take them away from me? God why did you bring me here? I had never felt like I had really experienced any of those wandering questions in my relationship with the Lord. I felt as though in most things I had been pretty content. Until today.
 
Today was a day like most here at Vision Nicaragua. We have been working on a building project on the compound to build a house for Mario, our driver here and one of the most dedicated workers I have ever met. But while we were working we had been gathering up trash and built up grass scraps and loading them into the truck so we could go to the dump. Me and five other people from my squad volunteered to go to the dump to drop it off.
 
As we were driving there on a truck filled with trash, flies, mud, and local people from Chichigalpa I guess I expected the dump to look like most in the U.S. just a big area to dump everything you had. But no. As we drove down the dirt gravel road, I was surrounded by beautiful expanding fields with hundreds of acres and mountains and volcanoes filling behind. And then after driving a couple minutes longer we were at the dump.
 
I had never felt more broken inside. Besides the mounds of trash scattered everywhere. There were houses. Houses made of trash. Cardboard houses covered by curtains made of old crumpled posters. Next to each house was a yard that was piled higher than my head of bottles. That is how they make a living there, by selling old used bottles that they collect at the dump.
 
As we left the dump, it was hard to process everything I had seen. How I could be surrounded with such natural beauty and wonder of God’s creation and then be in the midst of a complete juxtaposition where such devastation and poverty lives.
 
And this is when the questions came. Why God? Why do people live this way? Why is it that I have it so good? Why wasn’t it me living in a house made of trash? Why do I complain when I have it so well and these people work so hard without any complaints? I was fighting so many questions and it seemed like they would never stop. But after several minutes of internally battling with God, it was as if He put his arms around me and just said, “Stop”.
 
I felt a peace inside me that could only be explained by the Lord. I know that there are many things that I don’t understand and this extreme poverty, is something I don’t. Why it’s not me, I don’t either. But what I do know is that the Lord is Sovereign in all of it. In the brokenness, in the pain, and in the suffering He is past my understanding.