Nothing Moved Me More than Feeding a Stranger

Dayna Bickham recently participated in our Wrecked Vision Trip to Guatemala.

Dayna is a wife of nearly 19 years and a mom of two teen girls. She is a blogger and the author of The Purpose of Chosen. She also contributes to other sites around the web and loves to serve on mission trips around the world.

"This adventure with God is like the best ride at a carnival: equal parts fun and and equal parts scary, but irresistible either way." – Dayna

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He seems angry.

His tongue spills out over his chin because he has no teeth left. He sits in the middle of the shaded courtyard, somewhere in the middle of Antigua, Guatemala, among a group of about twenty others who have been abandoned by their families. They live out the rest of their days locked away in a home for orphaned seniors.

As we walk in — a motley crew of writers, adventurers, and missionaries — we skirt his wheelchair.
We walk past him.

We find friendly smiling faces to sit beside. We smile and laugh. We pray and hug.
We speak in broken Spanish and pantomime.

Still he sits alone: shoulders slumped, resigned to solitude.

The staff members begin to move around us in a ballet performed every morning. Delivering cups of gruel to each resident. Breakfast is served.

I sit with a smiling woman in a red New York beanie and help her hold a cup too hot for her arthritic and shaky hands. She is as beautiful to me as the man sitting alone seems ugly.

Then, as if scales fell, I suddenly see him.

He is alone. He has no gruel. Even the nurses have walked right past him. He is hungry.

He is crying out in his muteness to be fed, to be loved.

I am still uncomfortable. I still cringe inside. This is not my custom to serve someone so different. But something in me breaks open. Like a flood of love, and I am moved to action.

Before I know it, I am across the room.

Cup in hand, I began to help him eat. Someone hands me a spoon. It helps the process, but this is still not easy. Slobber and gruel mix as it dribbles out of his mouth.With every bite, the love I feel for him pushes up against my discomfort. Yet nothing I have ever done before or since has felt more right.

Nothing has moved me to weep more than the moment I fed a man I did not know.

This is the moment I am wrecked.

Completely torn open and exposed before a loving God who shows me the love he has for us goes beyond anything I had ever imagined.

Months earlier, I had prayed for God to give me his heart. He answered. He let me see.

 
Whether you’ve been praying for God’s heart for months or moments, consider joining us on an adventure where you can come face-to-face with a broken world.