Jealous of Noah

I was talking to a friend from school last night. He is going to Kenya this summer to help at a refugee camp. He is going to build houses and wells and set up small businesses for these people. He's going to talk with them and share meals with them and tell stories and hurt with and exchange jokes and cry and play and live with them. He's not going to get air conditioning, normal food, showers every day or clean living space. He's going to live this summer.

And I am extremely jealous because I want to go. I want to live this summer too. I want to leave the whitewashed sidewalks of affluence and furious storm of lights whizzing by carelessly on every highway. I want to exchange the air-tight, conditioned cage they tell me speaks of progress and the flashy, glitz encrusted things I keep accumulating and trade them in for a simple hut, dirt floors and wide spaces waiting for love to rush in. I want to look in someone's eyes and realize with them that they matter more to me than the growing pile of flammable waste that keeps becoming my goal in the hamster wheel I'm clambering onto again and again and again. I want to know what it means for Jesus to be the only thing I have so I stop forgetting He's the only thing I need. I want to realize that enough with a Redeemer is so much more valuable than excess without Jesus. I want to speak for people that keep getting silenced by oppression. And I want to be able to say that my life and the blessings I've been given were poured out on someone from whom everything was taken out of greed and malice and rage that they didn't earn.

Instead I'll stay here. I'll learn and I'll earn and I'll forget and I'll grasp again and again at the smoky idea of success that we keep whispering to each other means reaching the top. But maybe, just maybe, I'll forget a little more slowly this time. And maybe I'll remember a little more quickly in the future. And maybe one day, my heart won't ache so much. Not because I quieted it with accumulation but because I let it run free and stopped confining it. Whatever that looks like. Whatever any of this is ever supposed to look like.

Sometimes, I can't tell what I want to go overseas for more. To give a voice to those who's voice was taken from them. Or to find my own