Beautiful - FMF

I spend a significant amount of my time overseas - in communities all over the globe. I'm grateful for a job that takes me to places where I see more of Jesus, where the Gospel gets bigger and the world gets smaller. It's changed me. It's made me see how God makes beautiful things out of messy places and messy people and messy communities.

The thing I think is the most beautiful is the community found in other countries that we, as Americans don't have or value. We live for ourselves - we rarely open up our homes, our wallets, our lives to our own families, let alone those who are different than us. We live such independent, self-focused lives and it makes me sad. I want to be in a community that's a beautiful mess like the ones I see in Haiti - where people feed their kids, their sister's kids and their neighbor's kids because if they don't, then who else will? They live in one big house, love each other and get on each other's nerves, but they provide real, genuine community for one another and they understand what it's like to "have each other's back." They would give anything for someone they love to have food, shelter, education and a future...anything. And that's beautiful.

While we sit in our houses with more than we could ever want or need, may we remember today that messy is beautiful, community is beautiful, living for something other than ourselves is beautiful.