fragrant

Five hundred and forty-one.

Now that the pile has gotten this small, I can easily count through the names remaining. What seemed like an insurmountable task at the beginning has dwindled to a list of fifty-nine people.

The end of this outreach is turning into such a bittersweet time for me. Usually, my head is caught up in the successes right about now. I find myself running back over stories in my mind, remembering what we accomplished over the past months. This time, it's so different. This time, there is so much sadness mixed in with the joy.

Yesterday, I sat in the International Lounge along with all our Day Volunteers, the Togolese people who came onto the ship to serve their brothers and sisters alongside us this year. Together we watched a video slide show of photos from the outreach, and when the before and after photos of several patients came across the screen, the place erupted into cheers the like of which I haven't heard since the World Cup ended. We sang and danced and rejoiced together, and all I could think about was how many e-mails would be waiting for me when I got back to my room, how many more names I would be able to send out.

It's not just them. It's O'Brien and Anicette and Tim's dad and Mawuli, a dearly-loved patient whose funeral I attended last night.

I sat in a small Catholic church somewhere in Lome, the words of the Mass washing over me like rain, and I didn't realize I was crying myself until I felt the back of my hands grow wet. I stood and knelt and prayed and a wave of sadness threatened to overwhelm me.

Until I looked up to see the priest, eyes to heaven, holding up the cup, blessing the wine. A line of people moved slowly up to the front of the church, past the wooden pew where I knelt, to take Communion, and then everything was right again.

Because if all this rests on my shoulders, then I should let the sadness engulf me; there would be no way for me to stand up against this fight. And then I remember that it's not mine to win, that I could spend my life campaigning against the injustice in this world and never come close to the victory that was won on a hill outside Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago.

And for me, that puts everything back into perspective. Instead of a failure, this pile of pink sheets has become what I'm honestly seeing it as; a chance for all of us to take one more faltering step closer to God. Instead of looking at them and seeing what we couldn't do, I'm looking past them, at all of you, and seeing what we are doing. We are storming the gates of heaven on behalf of the poor, speaking the names of the forgotten ones in love.

And if our prayers are truly incense, like it says in Psalm 141, then heaven is fragrant tonight.