Whatever you did for the very least of these.....

This morning I finished up the red moon rising book. Woo hoo. I read about Jesus and when he sent out the 70/72 (I recon Id been the 72nd) and how the first instruction was to declare peace on the house you approach and how in this very act of inviting God in to a situation to bring peace, just that can break strongholds that have excited for time. Little did I know how soon it would be apparent to do just that.
I’m still in a bit of shock as to the events of the past few hours. I’ll do my best to explain it in the most sensitive way possible. We went to a school, Faton has a friend who is a teacher in England and is hoping to twin with a school in Kosova, I learned they also support two other schools in Kosova (is there anything these guys don’t do?)

So we’re travelling back to the city, and we pull of the road and on to a dirt track. Such is the routine, we just stop off to see a family, that are ‘’very poor’’ When you hear those words you make certain assumptions (but as a very wise person once told me ‘’to assume make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’) when you’ve been here for a while and they say by Kosovan standards, these people are very poor. Then you need to prepare yourself. So we pull up in front of the usually redish orangey brick house. The first striking thing is that there’s a door with space for glass panes but no glass. At first, as its hot, It doesn’t register but when you look up and see all the windows have no glass in and relies the winter take the temperature down to minus 13 you start to see the harsh realities of life. We are met by the lady of the house. At least one of them, she’s a simile girl of about 7. She takes us inside to a house, I can’t describe well enough. To say it was in poor condition would be to deny the extent of the English language but that’s all I can say. There was, I think a wash room with a hose and water on the floor amongst bricks old cement and blue tarpaulin. The front room has bare concrete walls there’s a light bulb in the middle of the ceiling, held up by some twisted wire and trailing a lead that drapes across the ceiling down one wall and one the front door. The little girl tells us there are two families living in the house, and that she has two brothers. She then, with hardly time to think about being sad, tells us one of the sons of the other family, a boy the same age as her, just 3 days ago died! He had some kind of tragic accident with the rope of a tree swing!
We pause,
what do you say?
The girl, it seems, is almost unshaken by the fact, weather because it hasn’t sunk in yet or weather because they are so accustom to the depths of poverty, to the struggles of life and to the harsh realities of their situation that this isn’t a surprise, that something of this nature would happen to her. Her 7 years in this world have seen far too much suffering for the oldest of faces. Her mum has gone to the city to find bread for the family? The mum of the other family comes in, the mother of the boy, we offer our embarrassed, unprepared awkward apologies for her loss and listen as she tell us how the two families don’t really get on, about the girl who has so happily welcomed us, and her farther who only comes back once or twice a month, such is the separation between them. Little did I know, the instruction to invite God to bring peace upon a household that so desperately needed it would present itself in such a raw way so soon.
As we leave we decide to buy food. A quick stop at the convenience store and were back on the road. As we offer our humble gift of food, I’m met with a contrast of emotion. On the one hand I feel almost pleased with myself to be offering food to the hungry. On the other the terrifying reality that in a week the food will be gone, the window still will have no glass, the families could still not get on, the wash room won’t improve the danger from the barely held together electrical system will be ever present. And nothing will bring back the son, brother and child of God.
Kjamalina leaves a selection of clothing for the family and we leave. I pray franticly as we walk out and on the drive home, I feel as emotional as always, and as we pass hundreds of other similar houses my heart almost shatters at the thought of what we might find behind each door, as we get a little deeper beneath the surface
I also so amazed by the work hear. These guys walk a daily tightrope, not quite the tightrope of street cred that Mike Skinner refers to but of desperation and hope.

One side lies the utter deprivation of situations, the other, a desperate hope, hope for more than this, hope for justice to reign, hope that the very spirit of a living God would be poured out on all people and bind the broken hearted, and proclaim freedom to those stuck in the ever-present poverty trap struggling just to stay alive.

Please pray as if it all depends on God as these guys strive to work as if it all depends on them

For the moment the strength simply comes from those resounding words, whatever you did for the very least of these you did for me, (no matter how seemingly little it may have been)