See You in Heaven, Sister

My friends and I are getting ready to move out of our first house together so I began sifting through all of my things at the beginning of the week. I'm a super sappy girl so packing tends to take me a LONG time because I like to reminisce about everything I find.  

When I began packing I came across all my old journals. There's probably seven of them that have moved from my parents' house to dorm rooms to my current house over the years. A lot of times, I forget I even have the journals. But I love the way that God works and how I remember these journals at just the right moment. See, these journals are ones that have seen me through high school and college. They hold my memories from the mission trips I've been on. They hold the prayer requests of those dear to me. They hold the sermon notes of hundreds of services I've sat in on. They hold the words God spoke to me through Bible studies I have participated in. They hold the feelings of a broken heart and the excitement of a joyful spirit. Basically, any side of Addie that you want to see--these journals hold it. As I was packing up, I decided to just skim through the journals I kept on my trips to the Philippines, Peru, and Ukraine {probably because I had my Ghana trip on my mind}. 

As I was reading through, a story that I had written in my Peru journal caught my eye and God just spoke to me through it just as loudly as He did when I experienced it. So I wanted to share it. :)

I was about to be a junior in high school and I was traveling on a medical mission trip to Peru. Why I was going on a medical trip? I have no idea--but I absolutely loved it. Typically me and the other high school girls went to the schools in the towns we were visiting to love on the kiddos, but some days we helped in the clinic we set up. Our clinics were really neat. We set up in a public area and offered free medical attention to the people. They saw a nurse and a doctor, received medicine from a pharmacist, but the coolest thing was that they also visited an evangelism station where someone shared the Gospel with them. The year I went we also took a ton of glasses to give away. Since I'm not medically trained (lol at the thought of that) or fluent in Spanish (again, lol--have you heard me try to roll my r's?), I couldn't do much in the clinic. But when I worked in the clinic it was either in the makeshift pharmacy or with the glasses. This particular day I was working on getting patients fitted for glasses and that's when I met Victoria.

Victoria was a precious 97 year old lady. One thing I could definitely see about Victoria was that she had a heart full of Jesus. We began to talk a little (with the broken Spanish I knew) and with the help of a translator, I quickly learned a lot of her story. Victoria was the only one left in her family; she had outlived her husband and her children. That absolutely broke my heart. But as my facial expressions changed, Victoria quickly reassured me that she was okay. She made sure I knew that not having a family didn't matter to her because she had Christ and that was all she needed. Victoria was being fit for glasses and to test out each pair we would have them read from a Bible so we could determine whether the prescription needed to be higher or lower. When we put the first pair on Victoria and told her to read, she started crying. She kept crying and reading the verses out loud. She wouldn't stop. Any time we asked her if she needed more, she just kept reading. We asked her why she wouldn't stop and she told us that she hadn't been able to see in years. This was the first time in a long time that she was able to see well enough to get into God's Word that she didn't want to stop because she was so overjoyed. As we were finishing up with Victoria, she sang and danced for us because her heart was so full. Right before she walked out, she gave me a huge hug and whispered, "I'll see you in Heaven, Sister."

What Victoria doesn't know is that she rocked my world that day and, five-ish years later, she's still impacting my life. Her pure joy at getting in the Bible stirred such a conviction in me then and in me today. I, too often, look at my time in the Word as something to just check of my "good Christian" checklist. She reminded me that it is so much more than that. May I approach my daily quiet time with the same eagerness and the same heart that she did. May I look at life through the same lens that she did because I, too, have Christ and He will always be enough.

I'm so grateful for my encounter with Victoria and how something that happened several years ago is still relevant to my life. I still remember her sweet hug and her soft, tender whispers like it happened just yesterday. I look forward to the day I get to see this sweet sister again and I get to thank her for the difference she made in my heart.

I'll see you in Heaven, Sister.