or cook with. These women will walk miles with 30-40 lbs of wood on
their heads, and then they'll walk two miles or more to the market where
they attempt to sell if for less than a dollar. Life is so hard here.
When I look at them I can't help but think of how heavy their load is.
Today I saw three little girls, probably only 8 of 9 years old, and they
were walking the two miles to the market to sell their bundles of wood.
These bundles were bigger than the little girls; how heavy the load is
for them.
I saw Pierre on the road trying to carry this branch that was probably
only 20 lbs. He's around 50 years old, but has the look of an 80 year
old. The load was a little too much for him. There are families with
young people all along the road, and not one person was about to offer
him assistance. I stopped him and offered to take this branch from him,
and with a big smile he handed it to me. I didn't realize that his
house was as far as it was, and at the speed he was walking it took even
longer, but we finally made it. The walk was a bit far, and a bit hard,
I even had to change shoulders a few time, and my body is still young.
Without help he would have struggled for a good half an hour trying to
take this branch home. The loads that these people carry...that we all
carry are too heavy. I see it everyday when women are bent over from
work, when children are carrying as much as the parents, or when mothers
hold their dying children because there's not money to take them to the
hospital. I see it when friends struggle with depression, when couples
get divorced, and when Satan attacks us and wants to separate us from God.
Today, I went to another funeral. The family built a platform about 5ft
high and placed this young man's body on it. I saw women coming and
wailing around him, grabbing his arms, crying out as if they had just
lost their own son. Sometimes I don't think that they are just crying
because someone died, although that is part of the reason. I think they
cry from all the work, all the death, all the births, all the beatings,
all the corruption, all the starvation, all the neglect, all the pain.
The only place where it is normal and excepted to cry is at a funeral,
and that's where all their suppressed emotions are able to come out, and
they are able to feel all that there is to cry about here.
After I dropped off the stick at Pierre's house, he was so grateful for
what I did. I have never seen someone so happy and thankful for
something...and I only carried his heavy load. I really didn't do very
much, but he still wished that he had something to give me. As I walked
away, I remembered that I had an old cabbage and some noodles in my bag;
they weren't the best, but I went back to his house and gave them to
him. Again he was so grateful, telling me that he wouldn't go hungry
tonight now, and again said he wished he had something to give me.
He'll never understand that his gratitude was enough. My heart was
filled with excitement and happiness, and all I did was offer to help
lighten his load. We are too weak to carry these burdens on our own, we
need help.
God does the same thing for us. No matter how heavy, or how long we've
been carrying our loads, God's arms are open to carry it for us. There
are too many people who don't know this yet, who are walking around
Tchad, who are walking around the United States of America, who don't
know that God will carry their burdens. They don't know that there is
help in the Lord, peace in His love, and water and food for the soul
that will never run dry. It's our privilege to tell them.
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