The Sum of Love

We think about numbers a lot. Numbers help us keep track of things, they make things orderly, they provide labels, they bring sense to chaos. I cannot even conceive of a time before there were numbers. I don’t know how people survived.

I wonder about Jesus’ numbers sometimes. We, in a sense, are doing what Jesus did. We are traveling from place to place, ministering to the needs of the people there, praying with them and showing the love of God. How tired he must have been. How often he must have longed for time alone, but when he came to a new place, his reaction was always the same. He saw the crowds, and he had compassion. Regardless of how far he had walked, how hungry he was or how much he wanted to be alone, he always had compassion. But when he did, he always knew that he was doing his Father’s work, and it brought him joy.

I like to imagine what his numbers would have looked like. Maybe….

500 miles walked

40 days in the desert

12 close friends

3 years of ministry

5 loaves of bread

2 fish

10,000 people

10 lepers

1 betrayal

39 lashes

3 days walking the pits of Hell

1 victorious resurrection

His numbers were hard, but he knew it was worth it. His numbers were an act of love.

Our team went through a lot to get here. We were weary, and wondered if things would work out. We persevered and hoped and prayed in spite of everything. Sometimes, in the back of my mind, I wondered if it would be worth it. Sometimes, I thought it would be easier not to come to Honduras. My numbers look more like this:

115 take home meals made

300 hours cooking food and making cookbooks

1,000 dollars donated to me by family and friends

2 donations from people I have never met

1 missing passport

11 missed days of work

20 stuffed animals

4 hours in flight

10 much-anticipated Honduran friends

2 bouts with motion sickness

14 days without my family

6 Spanish children’s books

1 joke about an ant and an elephant

And like Jesus, when we get to the place where we are going, we see the crowds and we always have the same reaction. Compassion. We realize that every hardship is worth it. Every moment of stress and frustration and fatigue is worth it. Jesus had his moments, I am positive, where joy overtook every other emotion, because he knew he was walking the road that God had told him to walk. We can say the same thing. And we too have those moments, where joy overtakes us.

The number add up, and the result is beautiful. The sum of all my numbers is love.