More than any place I have ever lived, this country and the conditions of its people are heartbreaking. Heartbreaking is the word that distinguishes it from all other places we have lived and served.

I was sitting on the walkway of the third floor apartment where we live this morning. We have a bird’s eye view of a rubbish pile along the road below. I sat and watched a very old man sort through the pile, picking up papers that had been discarded, brushing them off and stacking them neatly in his hands to be used again. Who knows what purpose they will be reused for… a child in school who has no paper to write on, a letter to a family member who has fled the fighting? All I know is that it makes me want to cry.

Such things affect me and linger; I well remember almost 35 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer in the desert town of Gao, Mali, watching an old woman … maybe not so old, but her life had aged her physically … on her hands and knees sifting through the market sand at the close of day, picking up individual grains of rice that had been spilled and filling a small plastic bowl.

I read a quote from Phillip Yancey’s book, “The Question That Never Goes Away”. It says, “No answer to suffering will satisfy, even if we had the capacity to comprehend the answer. Like Job we can only attend to the small picture, clinging to belief against all contrary evidence, while trusting God with the big picture.”

We are trusting God in South Sudan.