On Not Saying Goodbye

August 10, 2014August 10, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 1 Comment

There’s this thing on the ship that people talk about all the time. Or maybe they don’t talk about it enough. It’s a nasty little gut check, a surprise I got this week as posts from DFW, Heathrow and Tenerife filled my newsfeed.

Every day, Mercy Shippers make you fall in love with them and then they leave.

They leave Texas for the ship. They leave the ship to go home, or they leave the ship forever to write the next chapter in their lives. After returning from field service in Haiti, and saying goodbye (or not) to a group of 30 (not 31) people who forced me to come up higher, listen harder, pray deeper and trust God more than I ever have, my heart broke in new and unusual ways.

My gosh, I’ve only known them for eight weeks. Please. But I’ve been skulking around their lives the whole time, asking questions I can’t even believe I ask. Questions that maybe we should ask more often in church, but don’t because we’re too busy, polite or afraid.

“Tell me about your Dad.”

“What’s the Lord saying about that?”

“What’s happening on the boyfriend front?”

I don’t know who gave me permission, maybe I just gave it to myself, but when you ask hard questions, people bristle, they fight, they cry or they breathe a sigh of relief and say, “My God, do you see me in here?”

Jesus sees you in there. It’s his light we’re shining. His is the only one I’ve found that reliably chases out the darkness. There are people sitting next to you right now, whose story would break you in half, if you knew it, but we avoid it because people are messy and loving them is costly.

Especially when they leave.

I’ve decided this is the Lord’s way of teaching me empathy for the crew of the Africa Mercy – people who live, work, eat, cry, pray and laugh together until the day they walk down the gangway in tears or stand atop it in tears, waving. Painful goodbyes are such a regular event on the ship, people say they’re not sure leasing real estate in their hearts is worth it. They know exactly how bereft that land will be when their sweet little squatters are gone.

That’s plainer to me now after a year of Gateways, and in particular this field service in Haiti, where I camped on a bunch of new real estate and let people camp on mine.

One day, when I nearly hurled a garden hoe across a huge weedy field and later sat on a 100-degree rooftop and cried, two different somebodies showed up to remind me that God is working in me too, and if all I can muster is to walk humbly as I grope my way through, well then, they’d happily stand by, praying.

I’d love to say I have a salve for the painful goodbye, but I don’t and frankly I doubt I’m meant to. Maybe a little longing, a little pain is part of the fullness Jesus had in mind when he explained what he was doing here. Remember Jesus didn’t promise us happy, he promised us full, and there is a difference. So if full means missing these faces until I climb the gangway again, I’ll take it.

Ship videographer Josh Callow put it like this in a blog post he called The Pieces of My Scattered Heart, which I beg you to read because it’s his heart laid bare on this topic, in a fearless and magnificent display.

The thing that is so great about Mercy Ships is the ferocity with which we love. These people that travel across the world to work for no pay to serve the poorest of the poor are some of the most selfless folks you’ll ever meet. They dive in head first and love at full speed…

So June 2014 On Boarding – Go dive in and love at full speed. Then pair up in threes as soon as you can.

xoErin

*As ever, the thoughts are my own, not those of Mercy Ships, but I’m pretty sure you know that.

Notes From Haiti

July 30, 2014September 19, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 8 Comments

It’s always the same for me, flying into the developing world.

I look at the miles of tin shacks, busted up towns, dirt roads and smoke and I get scared. The terrain rips my carefully-affixed American blinders off like Bandaids, and fear of the unknown whispers, “Welcome to ugly, welcome to depraved, you’ll probably be a victim of something heinous here and nobody will help you.”

Luckily, those thoughts are frail. As long, sweaty moments pass in immigration, the fear recedes, because staying mentally hysterical takes a lot of energy and everybody else, the Haitians I mean, are just waiting quietly.

Haiti, it turns out, is so much like West Africa it’s disorienting to recall that Florida is only 800 miles away. One hour and 20 minutes on American Airlines flight 337.

But Florida is so much farther than 800 miles away.

Kim Kardashian if you’re reading this, and I’m pretty sure you are, you ought to swing down to Haiti on your next trip to Miami. I think if you saw it – kids struggling to scratch out a fourth grade education, some of them eating only 4-5 times a week, – it might wreck you permanently.

America darling, we need a good wrecking.

Christian ministries like Nehemiah Vision feed local kids everyday, sometimes twice. They host English camps and the only community clinic for miles. They grow food, train local leaders and create jobs for about 80 Haitians. Plus, its founder is Haitian, and we, this rag-tag band of multi-national Mercy Shippers, work under his authority.

If NVM’s work sounds noble, I assure you it is, but I struggle to describe how grinding hard it is. On Monday, the heat index was 112 and it hasn’t rained since March. The streets of Port Au Prince are so choked with potholes and busses, pregnant stray dogs and noise, it’s hard to hear yourself think. Many of the children from English camp told us their life dream is just to get out.

On days where I secretly calculated the minutes until I would use my vast American privilege to get out myself, it occurred that if I learned nothing but deep compassion and respect for Haitian resilience, that would be a fine start.

Pastor Pierre, NVM’s founder, who grew up in a dirt floor tin shack, got out, but in an act of sheer obedience, he doubled back. Today, he’s responsible for a small slice of a new Haiti, a generation of readers, leaders and lights. His students are passing their exams in the nation’s top tenth percentile.

So I’ve been thinking, why is it fair to single out Kim Kardashian as the most irresponsibly gauche and indifferent American? To the Haitians who survive on $2 a day, my middle class life in the US is just as impossibly lavish as Kim’s. No sense in me sending the responsibility for poverty up the food chain to someone even better heeled than me.

I’ve bagged the white guilt though, recognizing it for the waste of time it is. What I have instead is responsibility to a generous maker to whom I’ll give an account. And when he says “Baby, I put you in a good family, in good schools, in America at its economic apex. What did you do with that?”

What will I say?

I’m rarely sure of the right answer, so at the start of each day, I sit with Jesus and ask “what do you want me to do today?”

Then, I just get busy doing that.

Notes From a Big White Ship.

April 9, 2014April 9, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 4 Comments

Few times in my life do I ever recall sweating like I was in this picture. Part of the reason is, I was standing in a two-room orphanage in the Republic of Congo with about 20 people and no fans.

The other part was Destin, the little boy I’m holding. He clung to me so tightly, for so long in that sweltering room, that we began melting together like a s’more.

Destin wore me out, but each time I shuffled him around trying to rest my arms, little worry lines grew on his forehead. He clutched my shoulders and whimpered as though his tiny protest, might prevent the inevitable.

The inevitable was, of course, me setting him down and heading back to the Big White Ship, to my big white life, where I have choices Destin can’t even imagine.

What kind of world is this? Setting those babies down, as they reached back up to us and cried, made me wonder if it was fair to pick them up in the first place. Oh Jesus help. This life is brutal.

Luckily, I’ve learned to drop to my knees when I get to thinking like that because, newsflash – it’s not all up to me to fix.

So on the way out, we paused in the Land Rover for a second and I prayed for all the things we can’t change. And of course we prayed for them too. Lord. Families please! Hurry!

Baby Creche is a program hosted by a Mercy Ships division called Mercy Ministries. For this program, they load up a dozen or so ship folks and head out to a state-run orphanage to hug some babies. Simple really. Humans need hugging. Especially baby humans who are abandoned on trash heaps or orphaned by AIDS.

At the orphanage, nine women, working around the clock in shifts of three, care for the children. While they do their best, they are outmatched by the need, and it’s clear by the way Destin clings, physical hunger hasn’t been his only concern. Cribs line the walls and you have to watch where you walk because the women leave babies sprawled out on the tile floor.

It’s not a bad idea, it’s cooler there.

Malika This is my friend Heather holding a little boy named Malchiat.

Like Destin, it’s hard to guess Malchiat’s age because he is malnourished. He was on the brink when somebody found him in the market and brought him to the orphanage. The women nursed him and Mercy Ministries put him on a special and kind of expensive diet. Malchiat is putting on weight now, frankly, because Mercy Ships is in Congo providing him a kind of expensive diet.

But the ship pulls out in June.

“What happens then?” I asked my friend KJ.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

So, in a big, mean world full of things we can’t change, here’s to the things we can. They need us, we need you and we all need each other. If you too would like to hug a baby on the other side of the world, we can help you do that.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:27

**As ever friends, the views herein are my own, not those of Mercy Ships.