Never in a million years would I have thought I would spend a semester studying and living in inner city LA, let alone actually want to be here. And never would I have thought I would even be able to get into the program with all the various circumstances and things working against me. But after God told me at the end of last semester that I would be doing LA Term, I knew great things lay ahead.
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| My home in South Central LA |
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| Part of my new LA family:) |
And as it turns out, God was right. I needed this semester. I have only been living here for three weeks, and already I know my life is changing daily. My eyes are being opened, and God is slowly replacing my selfish heart with His compassionate heart. My heart is breaking for this city, and yet it is this same city that gives me an unexplainable hope and joy. Every stereotype I have ever been told and believed about this place has been broken in the past three weeks. I have met the kindest, most beautiful people in this city. I found love in the young man who kindly approached two lost and confused young girls and spent a significant amount of time pointing them in the right direction, quickly leaving before even accepting a simple "thank you." I found goodness in the Middle Eastern man who went out of his way to walk us an entire block to the store we were searching for. I found beauty in the contagious smile of Raul, a homeless man in our neighborhood who was God's answer to my earlier prayers. I have found such love and hospitality in this city. I have seen God in the faces of the residents, and everywhere I look I see His mighty hand at work.
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| My host sister :) |
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| Griffith Park Observatory |
Yet, with the beauty of this city I have also found despair. A homeless man walked onto the Metro with a box of his personal items the other week. Before he had even set the box down, the train driver stood up and looked at him, almost as if she were expecting him to do something wrong. As he set his box down in front of the conductor's door, she immediately told him to move it. He automatically and silently moved it, the pain and destroyed dignity evident in his movements. He sat on the box, and after a moment he looked around the crowded Metro and asked, "Where is this train going?" Silence. Again, he looked around and asked, "Where is this train going?" Again, silence. As Sarah later described it, he looked like a dog who had been cruelly beaten and whipped one too many times. Though he was looking around, desperately longing for acknowledgement, not one person dared even look into his eyes. Finally, a woman about five or six rows back answered him. I was in utter shock. I wanted to shout an answer to his question from my seat farther back on the Metro. I wanted to apologize for the outright cruelty of every person who looked away. I wanted to cry and cry and demand for God to tell me how that could happen. I wanted to scream at those people, and I wanted to run up to the man and hug him and plead for his forgiveness for every person there. This scene will never fade from my memory, this I know. It was the first time I truly and helplessly felt despair in this city.
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| Hike near the Hollywood sign |
With these moments of utter pain, followed by moments of pure joy and gratitude, you can imagine how emotional and difficult this semester has been so far. I am learning and I am growing, but it has by no means been easy. Yet, in the end, hope and joy has conquered the pain i feel. I still have moments where I feel helpless and simply want to sit and cry in God's arms, but I persevere on. I remind myself that I need to experience these things. I must understand and experience these feelings of despair and pain, because these are things God Himself is all too familiar with. He cries and longs for His hurting and beloved children in this world. His heart broke and tears fell from His eyes as He watched His one and only Son humiliated and murdered on a cross. It has been my longtime prayer for God to "break my heart for the people and things that break His," and that is what He is doing. In this city, I have found tragedy and suffering, but even more so I have found an ever increasing hope. And it is to this hope that I am helplessly and desperately grasping on to in this beautiful city.
