The Botswana Shaped Hole In My Heart

Let me tell you about how Botswana broke my heart. First of all its not pronounced “Bots-wana” like all of us Americans say it. The “Bots” part is pronounced with the same tone as if you were saying “boots”. It sounds so much better that way. Actually the way they say everything here sounds better, almost like they are singing it in the way the vowels just flow off their tounges like streams over smooth stones. Everything is rhythm and movement here; even the trees seem to know how to dance with the wind. It’s just a life style; the kind that grabbed me by the hands and began to dance not caring if I was ready or not, and continued dancing until this place had spun me around and around so much that I remembered what it meant to fall in love with life again. Prehaps that is why my heart is breaking. Until today I had forgotten what tears truly feel like when your soul pleads you to stay and yet the journey must go on. See, how can you leave a place that makes you feel like you are alive again? How can you forget that first you claimed that you hated this place and it danced you around until you were proclaiming God’s blessing over every step you walked here? How can you let go of this place when it gave you freedom? Set your wild heart free? How can you forget them? Forget the girl that dances to her own rhythm in the purple sandals you gave her? You will miss her beautiful voice proclaiming Jesus, bouncing through your log cabin house. How can you forget the powerhouse who has way to much attitude, but has a heart that loves the same way Jesus does? You somehow were lucky enough to discover that heart and speak truth over it in a beat up youth van with the Botswana sunset out the window. You will never forget that moment because that was the first time you ever let your story be truly told. Forget the soccer player whose darkness is deeper than most know, but who can stand and raise his hands up to a God who has the power to light up our deepest of valleys? Forget the teacher who taught art and the word of God like he was born with a Bible in his hands? Speaking true over us when we were suppose to be the ones preaching God to him. Forget the guard who you explained the earth’s rotation to and all he could say was, “Isn’t our God amazing?”? Forget the little kids that loved to give you hugs just because you existed? Forget the pastor you all nicknamed after a cookie, who is hilarious to scare, and has the biggest servant’s heart you have ever seen in action? We will forever be grateful. Forget the boy at the smoothie bar who thought your team were the coolest people ever? Forget the boy you met one day, convinced him to overcome his fear and climb a tree, and then told him your life story that same night? Forget the kindest soul to ever watch over your team? Forget the sweetest youth team you have ever met? Forget the youth pastor who yells his sermons in the power of God and laughs at his own jokes? Forget the children of the youth group who dance like David before God and bring the sound of heaven down to touch earth? They will be the revival this generation needs. Forget the dancer wearing a bucket hat and a constant smirk on his face? Honor is forever his word perhaps due to a hastily made decision or maybe because God has given him the spirit of a solider. A fighter, who although he falls, always gets back up in more strength than he had before. He is the one always there to make you laugh and the man who is going to raise up a generation to follow Jesus Christ our Savior through the power God has invested in him. Forget the people that changed your life forever? Forget the place where God called you “wild as the flowers of the meadow”? Forget the place that taught you what it felt like to not want to runaway like every other place you have been before? The place that let you cry for yourself for the first time since you can remember. The place that made you remember the things you didn’t want to, but needed to. The place that taught you that to be truly free you have to forgive yourself and understand that what happened to you was for a purpose that you couldn’t begin to understand until now in this very moment, in this very place. Forget Botswana? Never. Because how can you forget something you truly loved? And if I truly loved it, it would make sense why I can’t speak the words wanting to pour out of my soul without them get caught in my throat, why there are tears coming from bright blue eyes that I can’t control, and why my heart just broke so that out of the shattered pieces left over it could leave a little piece of it forever in beautiful Botswana.