Everywhere I look, people are burdened, literally burdened by the many things they carry. Donkeys, too, carry yellow “jonias” (water jugs) piled so high they begin to look like walking, plastic dahlia flowers that just happen to have donkeys attached to them. I’ve even seen them carrying cinderblocks stacked on v-shaped pallets. Women carry firewood, bound eucalyptus stalks, or a mass of plastic water bottles bound together, bent over loads all easily as wide as their carriers are tall.

Others are burdened just as much by having so little. Beggars line the streets alongside major roundabouts. Some have visible deformities, others are elderly with a younger spokesperson, perhaps a child or grandchild, but perhaps the most common is a young mother with one or two children clinging to her skirts, underneath an umbrella to protect them from the pitiless sun. Birr coins line the blanket on which they kneel. And all of this to survive another day.

The weight of all this is always there. When I leave our compound it is there, when I come back, it still hasn’t actually left me. There are some burdens you can’t avoid seeing. There are others we carry that, albeit less noticeable, affect us in very real ways. It’s this kind of burden I’ve been driven to think about lately, and what sort of weight am I carrying around. Is some of it worries that I can lay at the cross? Is some of it what God actually wants me to carry for a time, in order that His glory might be displayed somehow in my life?

Recently I was searching for a product on Amazon and a pop-up said, “Would you like Amazon to donate to a charity of your choice at no cost to you?” I remember closing the window in disgust, because I feel like if you give away something without it costing anything, what kind of charity is that? But that got me thinking; maybe God isn’t calling me to do “charity” work. He’s asking me to learn a way of seeing people and loving people in a way that costs me something.

But finding Him all-sufficient, finding fulfillment and joy in that cost. Once again, I find myself puzzling over Jesus’ familiar words: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” What is He telling us?? And what does it mean for me? What does it mean for those who are burdened, both inside and out?

Like the beggar at the gate of the temple that is called the Beautiful Gate, I realize that a lot of my frustrations have to do with messed up expectations. He wanted people to give him money, and that was all he expected. Being surrounded by poverty come out of a certain feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. I can help one person, but what about the millions of others? But then I hear God’s gentle voice telling me that I have somehow managed to make myself the center of their worlds. I have to be the one to help, and I have to think of something, do something, change something.

And so often in Africa, I find that the people I encounter also tend to carry these expectations of me. But what if in addition to helping where I can, I can lift up their face and they could see the face of Jesus?

But knowing that it’s not about me and my power to do anything, but it’s about His power to change people from the inside out frees me. Suddenly, our exchange is about more than my western privilege and their need. It’s about Him, the One who knows them, who sees them, and longs to fulfill their every need in Himself.

I am not sure I have the answer yet, but I think it has something to do with lowering my expectations of myself — to fix things, to do things, to help make things better. And not just that, but also raising my expectations of God and His ability to work wonders. Because I am not working with the whole picture, and am often driven by and focusing on entirely the wrong things. High expectations of myself only lead to exhaustion and hopelessness, at which point I am in danger of never wanting to venture outside our gate again. But if instead of retreat I can acknowledge my weakness before God, He delights in opening doors for meaningful ministry.

I am reminded of a passage by Corrie Ten Boom in the old classic Tramp for the Lord. She found herself in a polio hospital in the room where people were being treated with iron lungs. The sound of their wheezing and gasping, a new sight for Corrie, scared her. When a nurse asked if she’d like to speak to the patients, she looked around and said, “No, I think I am unable to talk. I just want to go off somewhere and cry.” And she could have, and so often I feel like I will. But instead, Corrie writes: “Always when I say that I am not able, I get the same answer from the Lord. He says, “I know you can’t. I have known it already a long time. I am glad now you know it for yourself, for now you can let me do it.” “All right, Lord, You do it,” I said. And surely the Lord did (159).” Corrie ended up telling all of the patients there about Jesus. As a result, one Jewish man, apolio victim, accepted the Messiah as his personal Lord and Savior just minutes before he died.

Every day I choose between going outside our gate and actively building relationships with Ethiopians or staying inside where it’s safe. One example is a friend I’ll refer to as Tsehay, though that’s not her real name. Her life is extremely difficult, as is the life of many Ethiopians in comparison to ours. She lives in a small room with her four children. For weeks they’ve not had water, or a place to hang clothes to dry. I felt helpless to change the circumstances of her life until I felt God asking me to do her laundry. Her children came carrying plastic bags packed full of clothes — I don’t know how long it had been since they’d been washed — and filled the back of our pick-up truck. Somehow doing all of that washing for Betty opened my eyes to something: I couldn’t change where they lived but I could do something. I could meet a simple need.

When I took one pair of pants off the clothes line I noticed it had a large hole in the crotch. I mended the hole carefully, and returned it to Tsehay with the second batch of clean clothes, on a Saturday. She told me later that the pants belonged with her older son’s school uniform, and he had an important testing day that following Monday. God wanted to prove His faithfulness to her in the very little things, and He wanted to use me to do that. Through this experience, He is teaching me that it is not up to me to figure out how to change everything. He wants to show people how deep His love is for them, and if I’m willing to be His vessel, He will provide for them everything they need.

But going outside the gate is opening me up to so much more than just what’s outside, this beautiful-yet-raw context in which I find myself. It’s opening me up to God’s grace in my weakness. I worry I will fail at language, but I go out anyway. I worry my Western privilege will discredit anything I have to say, that we won’t be able to connect on any real level. But God is changing my expectations, and theirs.

There are others living close by that I am concerned about the most. Unlike Tsehay, they are Orthodox and know of Jesus, perhaps like the man at Beautiful Gate, but God has more He wants them to know of Himself, a love that goes so much deeper than the icon posters that plaster the walls of their chikka bets. My prayer is not that they will see me as the one who lives in the big house over the wall, as the one who comes from a place of privilege, but instead, that I could give them Jesus and that they might for the first time in their lives know the power of His Name. Something more than anything they have come to expect.