Love, Justice, Freedom

While I was in Cambodia, a lot of the members of my team were discussing tattoos. Many of them planned on getting tattoos when they returned to their hometowns. All of these tattoo ideas were about words or ideas that would constantly remind them of our experiences. I don't have any problems with tattoos. I think they are for some people but not for others. They are not for me... the whole pain thing, plus who knows if I would love to look at it in 30 years... It's just not for me. But I wanted to do something. I wanted to do something artistic and meaningful. I wanted it to be something that could go in a place that would remind me each and every day of the things that I learned. So I bought a canvas and I painted.

There we go. So I will dedicate this one post to the first word that I painted. First I will tell you that the colors are all significant. The first color, which is a bright blue, is to represent one of the two girls I became attached to. She had three or four shirts total and two of them were that bright blue. That's what she met the night I met her... I will always associate that color with her.

Love.

Have you ever loved a person and all that they wanted was for you to express that love to them? Have you ever known someone who you were sent to love and they just relish in your love for hours? It's easy to love them.

Have you ever been told to love people that want nothing to do with you? Have you tried to love a person who just does not really feel the need to be loved by you? It's hard to love them.

The Rapha House girls wanted our love. I know that I loved those girls long before I met them... but I am positive they loved me before I arrived. They have so much love to give. But more interestingly, they want love. They just want to be held and adored. So that's what we did. From the moments we arrived until the moment I was sitting on the bus to leave Rapha for the last time, they loved on us and accepted our love. These girls were made to love and be loved.

So as you can imagine, when we entered the gates of the Kids Club in Phnom Penh, we were shocked. Initially I expected lovable kids to fill the area. But let me tell you about the kids that are not given the life at Rapha House. They are rough. We walked in the gates and were not greeted by smiling children who anticipated our hugs. We were greeted by children who looked us up and down and did not care to love on us. The hardest part was that they were reluctant to accept our love. I am guessing I hugged about 3 kids in the 3 or 4 days I spent there. Some children would run up and hit us and run away. We had instances of them drawing inappropriate pictures on the pieces of paper we had given them to draw on.

Honestly, I wanted to just go and sit down and have nothing to do with them. I had just spent 3 or 4 days with the most beautiful and lovable little girls in Cambodia and now I was with children who did not want my love. I told myself that my time is precious and I don't need to be spending my time trying to give my love to kids that don't want it. Uh, hold on. Did I just say that? Did I just say that I don't need to love the people who are harder to love and should just love people who already have plenty of love? You probably know where I am going with this.

One of the greatest lessons I learned was about loving people who don't want my love. Those people are probably the ones that need my love and attention most of all. Loving the girls at Rapha was sooo easy! But the Kids Club... it was soooo hard.

I think that we can find these two groups of people in America. We find people who want to be loved and we find people who think they are perfectly fine without the love of anyone. Those are the people that I want to love. I want to love the people who say they don't need love. I want those people to become like the other people who long to be loved by anyone and everyone and to give that love in return. I want the children of the Kids Club to become like the girls at Rapha, where love is in the center of their lives.

So I hope this can encourage you when it's hard to love someone. Whether it's someone you know, someone you don't know, someone you work with... just remember that those are the people that might need your love more than those who accept your love easily.