new song

This year is drawing to a close and I am safe and warm inside my cousins' house in Toronto. In a few minutes I'm heading up the street to join my fiance and friends and family and we'll all start the new year together.

I'm struck just now by the difference between the wildly different promises my new year and that of all my friends back in Liberia. I have no needs that ever go unmet. I am safe and loved and sheltered and fed. They will spend this next year just as they have all the others; fighting to survive, to make ends meet, to put food on the table.

It's hard not to feel a little ashamed as I pull on my coat and shoes and go off to celebrate yet another year. It's hard not to compare what I have with what they lack, and I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing that it's on my mind tonight. I've been so caught up with trying to find a way to live in my world here that I've pushed theirs to the back of my thoughts, told it to rest until I could find the time to wrestle with it again.

But I think that time is now. I want to start the new year fully aware of how blessed I am. It's not that I want to live crippled by guilt, but I want to go forward with my eyes wide open to the horrible poverty and desperate lives that so many face every day. I don't want to be seduced by my culture into thinking I need to have or be or do anything other than what God would have me have and be and do. I want to learn what it means to live purely and simply until the time comes when I can pack up my bag and head back to Africa.

My heart is filled with a new kind of song; I'm going to try and learn it by heart next year.