[I'm currently in week 2 in a 5 week long summer project/missions trip in NYC. I'll post more stories soon!]
If there was one word that I could use as the theme of my time here in New York, I would use the word broken. Not that brokenness is only seen in New York and not anywhere else, but that God is really opening my eyes to see how things are not as He had intended or designed. And it breaks my heart. To see such deep family hurts in students’ lives, to see homeless people sleeping on the stairs in the subway station, to see sex shops on street corners, it breaks my heart. Then I realize that as much as these things break my heart, I’m sure it grieves God all the more. He fully sees what the world was meant to be and He fully sees how far the earth is now.
And yet, I have hope. The world has hope. This, right now, is not the end of the story. Students with deep hurts is not the end of the story. People going to those sex shops on the street corners is not the end of the story. Homeless people sleeping on stairs is not the end of the story. In Him, we have hope; we indeed have hope in Him who sees the beginning from the end. God is the ultimate Redeemer and He is coming to redeem the world. He will come back to restore the world to the way it was supposed to be. And I can’t help but long for that great day. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away (Revelation 21:4). How I long to live in the world that is as God designed and intended!
