from cold tangerines.

I'm currently in the middle of reading Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist, and the essay that I read today is called "Broken Bottles". Incidentally, it is about her trip to Uganda, Kenya, and Zambia. Here's an excerpt that I wanted to share with you:

Africa is nothing if not evocative. It's a place of such unimaginable beauty and dignity and expanse and possibility, and such unfathomable suffering and despair and disease and decay. It is at once so alive and so wracked by death, so powerful in its landscape and physicality, and so powerless under the weight of famine and political upheaval and disease... Even now, four years later, I'm still piecing together what happened in me and what was happening around me in those cities and villages... You will see things and hear things, and then you will be responsible for them, for telling the truth about who you are and who you discover you are not, and for finding a way to make it right... Once you see something, you can't un-see it... There is hope for Africa, and there is hope for me, and for my neighborhood, for the shards of broken bottles that puncture and divide us all.

Wow. Two things are for certain: (1) God is going to work in amazing ways on this trip, and (2) it will be life-changing.