God Smiles

Today I read of a guy who was shot at the Kurdish school, the one I could never quite dismiss as a possibility even though it seemed a financial impossibility as a service opportunity for me. I looked at his facebook page to read the tributes and I thought, “ Did I miss it, Lord? Was I supposed to go? Imagine all that is happening right now..."

But today God smiled at me. Again. As I had finally immersed myself in my work enough that I wanted to check tasks off the list - said immersion was no easy feat, by the way. My friend voiced the paradox of singlehood as a homebody, “I really want to go home. But when I leave a pleasant crowd of happy people, or I know there is one somewhere, it’s hard to go to my house all alone.” And though I have a million things I want to do, tonight I wanted to go somewhere, be with someone so badly.

The wonderings came again. What is the point? What really matters of all that I do or wish to do? What will have a long term effect? Will anyone really care? My own siblings, in whom I invested more time and effort than any of the other children whom I contact, could care less. A relationship with me means nothing to them. What do I do that does matter?

That’s when God smiled. Now actually, He's done this a lot in the last few weeks but this time, the phone rang. It was a number in my contact list but for a few seconds I let it ring, not recognizing the name. It’d been so long I couldn’t pull the files of acquaintance, but as I answered, I was blessed.

“Rebecca. The card you sent, around Christmas, you don’t even know how much it blessed me. You don’t know what was going on. You don’t know how I needed those words.”

A card, Lord, a card. How do I judge what matters?