click to listen to mark’s audio blog – riga. latvia
when you’re so far from home, (4,399 miles if you drew a straight line!) it is so nice to hear something familiar…and so it was sunday morning at st. matthew’s church in riga.
the ability to sing amazing grace with our latvian brothers and sisters was wonderful. what made it fascinating was watching our lips move in english, while right behind us, the latvians were singing in their native language.
it was a wonderful reminder that someday we will all be worshipping in a universal language at the throne…and that the things that seem to divide us, like language…really don’t divide us all that much.
we spend the afternoon at an orphanage in jurmala that i have visited before. it was good to see that there have been some nice improvements since i was there 2 years ago. new lighting, brightly painted walls in the kids common rooms have made for a much nicer atmosphere for the children.
every time i go on one of these trips, i always try to be in “guard my heart” mode, but it never lasts for long. i always let me guard down for a couple hours, a kid steals my heart, and…well, you can guess the rest…
on sunday, it was ediys (ed-eez). this sweet little 9-year-old grabbed onto me right from the start. whether it was playing jenga or soccer, or the many times he just jumped onto my back, ediys is typical of so many of the boys we will see this week.
because the vast majority of these orphaneges are staffed by women, the boys who live there have almost no discernable male imprint on their lives. and that messes up part of the equation:
all kids need a dad.
i played with ediys until it got dark, and then it was time to go…
the excitement of these trips is meeting the kids and spending time with them. all kids that i’ve met around the world are just like mine…they want our attention…and they want to learn. the holy chaos of short-term missions vbs is so much fun. as americans, we are out of our element…and that’s a good thing. it makes us just a little sharper, just a little looser than we are in the day-to-day button-down world.
the tough part of these trips…the goodbyes. you say so many of them in 10 days, even the jet lag is better than hugging a little kid with an uncertain future…goobye.
pray for us this week…that the seeds we plant will find growth with the latvian volunteers for buckner who keep returning here every couple of months.
on to liepaja on the baltic coast on monday…more to come…
mz in lv
