So Justin and I are on the second year of getting our financial house in order, and recently to save money we gave up cable. This has brought about a return for me to an old love – Frontline on PBS. For those of you who have never watched it – Frontline is incredible. Seriously – set up a season pass in Tivo RIGHT NOW. It’s worth it. Frontline is a documentary program on world issues that educate and illuminate what’s going on outside of our little bubble.

I watched one on the Iraq war this week, and then tonight cried through one on Darfur and the genocide from 2003 – 2007.

For those of you who know me – that last sentence is shocking. I am typically a pretty oddly unemotional person about important stuff. I will watch sad shows, attend funerals or weddings of people I love (or even my own, wedding that is, not funeral :)) completely dry eyed and untouched. And yet if my car breaks down or I’m in an argument with someone, I might cry. I am kind of selfish in my emotion.

But Darfur touched me. Most of the program I spent literally on my knees, just asking Jesus to let me help people in situations like that around our world. Watching something like that emotionally is a little strange – you feel hopeless, you have a desire to help, you have the overwhelming feeling that you cannot help.

I don’t know if I have just grown up and begun to actually observe the world around me, but the past few years have really affected me. Everything from the Tsunami and other natural disasters, to the hunger crisis going on even as I write this, to genocides and governments oppressing millions of people around the world tonight – all of it just pierces my formerly cold soul. I just simply want to HELP.

To share the light of Christ. To feed the hungry. To show all of the sweet children starving tonight that God loves them and has a plan for them.

So what does that look like? I have no idea. Justin and I support children through Compassion International and occasionally give to WorldVision. We have the desire to adopt from another country in the future. We are paying off debt as rapidly as possible to free us to give more and more to missions. We just want to help.

My desire, my dream, is to impact people I’ll never see until heaven for Christ. And I am helpless to even do that. But I pray that the Lord will let me. That he will convict my heart to give. That He will provide the means for me to give. And then that He will use what I give and change lives. I am hopeless… but He is the God of all hope.

And so in my weakness I pray for the children of Darfur and Myanmar tonight. Jesus please be their comfort.