Living in Romania was also different than visiting because I knew I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t just get up and leave, even if sometimes I wanted to.
During my first few months in Romania, the poverty of the place would sometimes overwhelm me. Every now and then I just wanted to be home so I could have a good long cry about all the things that I had seen. When I was in Romania, giving into those emotions was impossible, because I felt like I had to keep my feelings locked away, that I would have to separate my heart from my mind somewhat, just to make it through it emotionally. I had to keep the things I saw from getting to my heart until I had time to really process what I’d seen and carry with me the emotional baggage that comes with it. Otherwise, it’s too overwhelming.
But by postponing my emotional release, I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t getting a hard heart. A mission team would swoop in and I would see Americans so easily cry or be moved by the poverty of the place. Yet, there I was, almost stoic in my determination to not let my feelings get the best of me.
I found that there’s a difference between hardening your heart and not allowing something moving to penetrate you and purposefully holding back emotions until you can properly deal with them at a later time. I always tried to do the latter. Not to become heartless and stone cold… but to become tough enough to deal with things when I could process them effectively.
More overwhelming than the emotional baggage of living in a poor country was the feeling of insignificance. Often times, I felt burdened about things that I wish I could change, but could not.
One day, I was walking to the store down the street today and saw two kids sleeping in the grass by the tram station. They appeared as if they were dead – like roadkill curled up on the side of the road. For the first time, it truly struck me that they have no home. Often, you see the beggar kids and the Gypsy kids and think “how sad” but when you see where they sleep, it hits home a little harder. It’s almost like… until you see that, you really in your heart can’t believe it’s true – that helpless children can actually survive on the street. And I thought to myself – even if these two children had truly been dead, how long would it have taken before someone would’ve cared to do something with them? Before anyone would’ve noticed or cared? My heart was broken.
written by Trevin Wax © 2007 Kingdom People blog
