I’m incredibly excited to be starting something new on vML. I’m going to have a guest writer post about once a week on her time with the Karen people near the Thai-Burma border. This girl is nuts, in the best way possible. She lived on almost nothing so that she could be a full-time missionary and caregiver to these wonderful people. Her adventures are funny, sad and exciting and I’m happy that she agreed to share them here. So with that… Please welcome Angie.

Rain – not temperate rain but tropical rain. It’s wet, warm, heavy and lovely. The Idaho drizzle that gently pelts my window tonight is just not the same. Now I sit in a little apartment with old wall-to-wall carpeting and comfort. Two years ago I sat on a floor mat in a concert room with a tin roof on the Thai-Burma border. The rain pounded urgently like so many fists frustrated to get in. The sound was deafening. Someone could have been screaming at me outside the door and I would have never known it.

The rain was God crying. I cried when the nights were filled with such thick, constant drops. I couldn’t sleep knowing that over a million Karen people just across the border were hiding in the jungle without so much as a piece of plastic to cover their babies let alone a tin roof. Torrential water and the threat of malaria is a safer enemy than Burmese military gunfire and landmines.

My tears soaked the cheap pillow I had bought in the outdoor market during the dry season. The holes in my roof were not over my floor-mat bed; I couldn’t blame the disrepair for my discomfort. Sometimes I’d sit up under my backpacker mosquito net in the pitch dark. Untucking the corner of the net, I’d reach for my solar-paneled flashlight. Switching it on created the eerie reality that I was not at home, but neither were my friends shivering in the jungle.

Some people think it’s noble to live like a minimalist and seek to be the two-handed gospel of Christ. For me it was a necessity and still is. The drive to understand the Burma situation was not for a cause but for a face with a name. And not just one face but many faces. He said that they would know we are His by our love for each other. How much did I love my Karen brothers and sisters? How much would I give to learn that it’s not just the Karen but every ethnic group of Burma that is suffering? For over sixty years the world has let the chaos go on.

I blew my nose, wiped my face of sweat and tears and clicked the flashlight back off. The bucket in the corner echoed each drop that hit it as the rain outside began to let up. What could I do for these people? Whatever it was, it was just a drop in the bucket of their pain. But as the drops subside, the crickets’ singing becomes audible again. It was never gone; I just couldn’t hear it. My prayers, your prayers, peel away pieces of the pain. Over the year I was to live there, I was to hear many heart-crushing stories. But despite the numbing reality of broken lives, I heard singing…every day. I came to realize that I needed them more than they needed me. They taught me what God’s forgiveness and grace truly are – miraculous, wet, messy, loud and lovely. The very word for their country is an exhale of peace – Burma. God, may it be so.