Reflections on Serving - Dan

This is the third time my son and I have gone to Colima, Mexico to work in an orphanage for a week. I am amazed, each time, with how much the workers care for each of the children there. These are people that work and work and work every day to care for children that have lost so much. These are people that love these kids and care for them day after day. They see the kids hurt, they see the kids hope, they see the successes as well as their failures. They are true heroes. They feed, clothe, encourage, teach, discipline and love. They do it all every day, day after day and year after year. I’m grateful that God made so many that love and care for so many others.

You can tell that the kids know how much they are loved. The natural playfulness of a child is alive and well in the vast majority of the kids. They have been freed from the burden of life’s circumstances and have a very structured environment where they don’t have to worry about clothes, food or if someone will be there for them or not. This frees them to play like a kid should play. It encourages them to learn like a kid should learn. It allows them to see God’s goodness in so much of life. These kids have the ability to love like no others. They have the ability to overcome their fear of strangers and in an amazingly short period of time they can hug you so tight that you feel as if you have known them for a lifetime.

I get so busy in life and so caught up in email, work projects, church responsibilities or running our boy to baseball that sometimes I forget the human element. I am so task oriented that something as basic as pure unadulterated love is somehow lost. How can that be? How can life be about things and not people? How is it that life gets in the way of what it means to live? I am again reminded, on this trip, that the way that I should judge if my life is successful or not is less about what I did and more about how I loved.