There is no one but us.

I am over in Ethiopia right now working for Glimmer - I'm in Addis, but I've been in the south and around Gonder in Amhara, heading to Tigrey this weekend. It's been a while since I posted - as you can guess, adoption news has slowed way down. This trip has meant much to me -- and I have fallen in love with the people over here.

 Below is an Annie Dillard quote that I have been thinking about a lot while on the road over here. Mainly there will never be a perfect time - that's not awkward - when you have your crap together to follow God's path. We are all broken people, and his people have always been that way. It's really empowering when you start thinking about it. Totally inspired.

 “A blur of romance clings to our notions of “publicans,” “sinners,” “the poor,” “the people in the marketplace,” “our neighbors,” as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single in themselves, while we now ae various, complex, and full at heart. We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead – as if innocence has ever been – and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us a chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seel the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations that which forget; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even a day.” – Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Blessings, C