brokenness

I've had this song stuck in my head for days. Specifically the verse about brokenness, but the chorus, too:

Take My Life

Take my heart
Mold it
Take my mind
Transform it
Take my will
Conform it
To yours
To yours 
Oh, Lord

I can't assert this with absolute certainty, but I think that my grandmother must have prayed a prayer like this song before they moved their family to Zaire. She must have said Lord, It's your will and not mine, so let's do this. Because it's crazy, right? No one in her right mind would pick up her family and move to some random place and live there for so many years and make so many sacrifices simply to serve those many years ago.

But she did do it, and it wasn't crazy. I think I've been struggling with uncertainty? She live uncertainty in a way that I can only fathom and knew that she could do all things through Him who gave her strength. His perfect Love cast out her very real fears and she followed the Lord to Zaire. She sent her kids to boarding school so that she and my grandfather could keep a rural hospital afloat. She hacked off the head of a snake right at the neck in order to preserve its head so that another doctor (and snake proficient) could identify what kind of snake it was. She traded tennis balls and knickknacks for baby monkeys and nursed them to adulthood because every time she said No More Pets, she didn't really mean it. She then named most of those monkeys Mud because they just loved dropping deuces on the coffee table. She must have turned to the Lord and said Take my life because no amount of preparation or planning could have foreseen any of that.

Then, in a very real way, she broke. I don't even know how many strokes left her a woman that I could only know through stories. The fracture lines of that break have been a part of my life from the earliest I can remember. On no other topic did the Lord and I do/will we continue to do such heated battle than in my attempts to understand why a woman who gave Him everything would be left the way she was. Why  did I have to watch my mother's heart break every time she remembered anew that her kids would never know her mom? The fractures run deep.

But the faith runs so much deeper. The echos of her life are a very real part of who I am and a very beautiful part of my relationship with my mother. It's the reason I am here in Rwanda. It's the reason that I long to be a mother myself one day and why I so genuinely desire to care for people. She is likely the reason I faint when I'm stuck with a needle. She loved old movies and musicals. Really the only thing I clearly didn't inherit is her intense hatred of goats (they are just so cute, I have no idea what she was thinking). In the years that she was so far away from herself, my grandfather had dinner with her every night and watched old episodes of Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke. He loved her with a faithfulness that I don't know I will ever understand, but it's so good to hear the echos.

Mom and I were talking on the phone, and she said, "I hope I am as good a mom to you as she was to me," and I said, "I know that you are." "How can you know that? I could have been a total loser mom." (YEAH RIGHT.) All I could say was, "I just know." The faith and the love seep into the fractures and hold the broken pieces in place. This is the kind of brokenness I will never get enough of. The kind that can only be healed by the most Perfect Love.

SO, Lord
Take my heart and mold it
Take my mind and transform it
Take my will and conform it To Yours

because she said it first.