Enter In

Henri Nouwen, in Out of Solitude, a book recording his speech addressing graduates at Princeton University, devotes several pages to the topic of “caring.”  It is from within these pages that I have been greatly challenged in the past weeks.  As an American, as a Type-A, task-driven individual working in Malawi I find that I have often times been compelled by the cure without allowing myself to truly care for the person. 

 Jesus always cared.  He was not afraid to enter into the pain or the need of the individual he was curing.  After years of working in Malawi, I began to attribute my comfort with poverty to the fact that I now know and see the people more than the situation.  But, a good friend who spent a year in Malawi put it best when she said, “They [Malawians] really do constantly know poverty that to me seems like a play they act only to go home and eat food from the Fresh Market or WholeFoods.” 

 After reading and re-reading this chapter, I found myself more cognizant of numerous opportunities to care.  In Malawi, the act of caring often times remains close to the original Greek word “Kara,” meaning to lament. For me, it has meant sitting or standing with a friend or child and allowing myself to feel what they feel and to weep for the things which they weep—an old friend suffering the loss of his baby, a young girl’s childhood replaced by motherhood, a child lacking the most basic of needs.  Because they are impoverished and because babies go hungry and die in the Third World does not remove their pain. 

 We each have the ability to truly care for someone.  I, for one, am beginning to better understand the importance and the necessity of allowing myself to do so.  It has not been easy and it has not been neat.  But, somehow in doing so, I have become acutely more aware of the commonality of our humanity and our common need for a God who can offer hope in the midst of hopelessness.