Give me your eyes for just one second / Give me your eyes so I can see / everything that I keep missing / Give me your love for humanity / Give me your arms for the broken hearted / the ones that are far beyond my reach / Give me your heart for the ones forgotten / Give me your eyes so I can see

… “Give Me Your Eyes,” Brandon Heath …

There are days when the truth and reality of my purpose here truly hits home.  I work every day, Monday through Friday, in the same learning center with the same students doing the same routine. Weekends are a blur of chilling out with friends, movies, and a good book, and then the entire routine begins again.

The mundane is a forest that we are all apt to get lost in within a matter of days, and many of us are perfectly content to remain that way. We don’t seek out the profound or the curious or the melancholy lurking in the trees because we are far too comfortable beneath our tall, shady tree. Today, that tree I had taken a rest beneath since Term 4 began was ripped out by its roots.

Every second week in a term, we have a devotional/prayer time with small groups of students from our individual learning centers. Since we lost our second supervisor at the start of the term, Nicole and I had to rearrange the students into two large groups, resulting in a hodgepodge of students from Grade 5 to Grade 10 in my group.  The 40-minute prayer time was a bit hectic since most of the girls in my group were chatterboxes, but at the end, I told them that if they had any private prayer requests, they could bring them to me privately and I would pray for them over the next two weeks. I had no idea what was coming.

I see these girls every day. I speak to them every day. I watch them laugh with their friends, talk when they aren’t supposed to, study for tests, and joke with them whenever I have a spare moment. Despite it all, we have no idea what these kids go through every day at home.  One student came to me asking for prayer for her father and family members living in his house because an evil spirit has been cast upon them and is now threatening their home and lives. Another student just wants to spend time with her mom and to find her father, both of whom are out of the picture. More girls came to me individually whispering in my ear, asking me to pray because all they want to know is who their father is.  Not just one girl, but four of them.  I know there are many others just like them in my learning center.

My heart and mind cannot grasp how much these kids suffer on a daily basis. How can I, an American girl raised in a loving Christian home with two wonderful parents and a younger brother I count as a friend, ever understand the pain these girls (and even the boys, I am sure) experience every single day? I have known and received love my whole life, but these kids have only had the merest shadow of the love I have been shown.  These kids need our love far more than we realize.

My fellow teachers and I are some of the few stable people in their lives.  We spend hours with them each day, helping them and hugging them and talking to them, but we fail to realize just how important those small gestures are. We find ourselves watching the clock, praying it will move faster so we can get home and read that book, talk to our friends, relax on the sofa. That is not why we have been called to this mission base and to this school. God sees these children.  He knows them inside and out. He knows their family situations. He knows their hopes, their fears, and their pain, and He wants to share this knowledge with us so that we, His hands and feet here on earth, can reach out to these kids and love them as He has called us to do.

How many children go unloved because someone is too comfortable in his or her suburban home to get out there and help?

How would this year have changed for my students if I had chosen to remain in Lynchburg, Virginia, with my nice car, dependable income, and loving family and friends?

How would Shayandima, South Africa, be different if the Palmers had refused to run a small ACE school in the Limpopo Province because they liked the city life?

What if the Shayandima School of Tomorrow closed down this January because people were unwilling to give up their homes and comfortable lives to serve God and His children in South Africa?

What if my students had nowhere else to go, so they ended up in a government school where love isn’t readily given or shown and where Christ isn’t mentioned?

What if …

There are a lot of “What Ifs” in life, but there is one thing I know for certain: God called me here to minister to those students in my learning center because they desperately need the love of God in their lives. Why God chose me to be His loving arms to these children I will not know until I stand before Him one day and find the courage to ask. Out of the millions of people on this earth, He chose me.

He has called you too.  Every person is called to be a missionary. Even if you are not called to a foreign mission field as I have been, you are still a missionary in your hometown. There are kids just down the road who may be as heartbroken as the African children I see every day. The question is …

What will you do about it?

Teachers are desperately needed here, but we need willing servants for God’s glory and purpose. For information on how you can serve in South Africa or help the students in the school and local area, contact me via Facebook, email, or this blog. I will be more than happy to convince you to join us here on God’s base and in God’s school: the Shayandima School of Tomorrow.