Ruined

When you look out at the world and realize that things aren't as picture perfect as you once thought they were... it leaves a mark on you. A burden is placed on your soul that doesn't just drift away. No, it changes you.

When a child tells you that they can't color the picture you gave them because they don't have crayons back home, its shocking at first. Surely you heard that wrong. You don't have any crayons? And not only do you not have crayons... you can't even go buy a box? You live in America. This is a land of prosperity- how can a five-year old child not own a box of crayons? Poverty like this... exists? Here?

When you begin sharing the Gospel of Jesus with a little child and they look back at you in perplexed wonder and tell you they've never heard of Jesus before...

You wake up.

While you once thought you where immune to foolish, childish ideas of how the world looks, you suddenly realize that you have no clue how the world really functions. You have no clue what poverty looks like. You have no clue what hopelessness looks like.

It looks like the little kid down the street who doesn't wear shoes... and its not by their own choice.

It looks like the children ravaged by the AIDS epidemic in Africa that we so quickly dismiss and sweep aside, assuming that God will place it on someone else's heart to intercede and do something about it.

It looks like the little ones trapped in slavery and bondage, suffering in ways that defy every aspect of our logic and go farther than our worst nightmares.

It looks like your neighbors and schoolmates who seem fine on the outside, while we know that deep down they are on the brink of collapse.

It's these "little" things that change you. They change you in such ways that you want to stay changed forever.

They ruin you.

In a good way.

I pray that we all become ruined in this way...