.chilling winds.

The wind from the Kalahari is strong, with the kind of strength and chill that demands your attention. It rips through the warmth of your clothing and ravages you in the night as you sleep. It's fierce, quick, and chilling. It robs you of warmth, disenabling you to think of anything but the cold. You're blinded by its bite.

So similar to the wind that haunts the village of Moralane, Botswana are the addictions, perversion, and hopelessness that paralyze this potentially beautiful village. Bling has traveled all over this year, but unanimously we agree that we've never seen sadness like we do in the people here.

It was our first day and we were touring the village with our contact Khumbulani. We'd visited a few huts, greeted some families, and prayed for the sick. But music blared from a nearby hut and Khumbu asked if we wanted to see....

TUCK SHOP was painted across the top of a tiny hut in bold black letters, and as many people as I had seen in one place stood huddled around this tiny yard, singing, dancing, and laughing. We crawled through the barbed wire fence, clipping pant legs along the way, and whispered a "Dumehlah" greeting to our yard of new friends. It took all of 15 seconds to know where we really were. Groups of women between the ages of 30 and 60 were stretched out before us with huge white pitchers overflowing in each hand. We all cast glances at one another and kept walking.

The women's elegant dance moves were now clumsy, their natural beauty masked, and their laughter deceitful. Confident that I was staring at the mothers of the village, nausea swept over me. The stench of urine that surrounded them was stifling, and as they greeted us, the pungency of their alcohol breath made you believe that you'd get intoxicated just by close proximity. Invading my personal space, one mother loomed closer, whispered something in Tswana, gripped my hand and tried to make me imitate her provocative dance moves. "Sorry friend, my hips don't sway like that..." With effort, I ripped my hand free and held my breath as she turned around. Nestled in the dip of her back was a tiny baby boy, gazing up at me in all of his naïve infant wonder.

"Oh Lord, can you really exist in a place like this one?"

Over the next few days, drunken women parading around the village became normal. They would stumble across the church grounds and whine about their misfortunes or come to our evening services and slur through praise songs. They'd call out to us for alcohol money or yell at us because we offered them no blankets. All the while, their neglected children stayed at the church ready for a game of volleyball. They played for hours; many from sunup till sundown, knowing that mom would never come looking or call them home for lunch.

A battle of anger and compassion warred in my mind as I witnessed these drunken escapades and the toll their selfishness took on their families. My flesh wanted to scream at them for being so negligent and for mocking the God I love. I wanted to rip those babies off their backs and assure them that Someone cared. I wanted to laugh with the other children until they knew there was more to life than the images their mothers' were painting. I wanted to serve those mothers until they saw the permanency of Christ and the temporary satisfaction of alcohol.

I wanted to hate those women. Trust me, I tried. But, I just couldn't...my heart broke for them and the Lord showed me throughout our entire stay that far too often I treat Him with the same disrespect as the women of that village. The only difference was I should know better.

I should have loved those women, instead of judging them.

Like that cold desert wind, sin creeps into our lives and paralyzes our ability to follow Him. It slows us down, redirects our gaze, and robs us of His freedom. The young prostitutes, the drunkenness, and the corruption in this village, made it easy to pinpoint sin and scream out judgments, all the while feeling good that my sins weren't quite so serious. <<Who did I think I WAS? Yikes. That is a whole other blog....>> But, instead of loving them through the struggle and offering encouragement, I offered judgment and disgust, forgetting my mission. Not exactly how Jesus taught me to love my neighbor...

So, as I conclude my stay here in Botswana with lessons learned, I'm broken for this village and the struggles that exist here. I ache for these children to be a generation that will unite families, conquer addictions, and silence hopelessness in the name of Christ. When I arrived, I struggled to see Christ existing in a place like this one...but as I sit in my tent, the wind is quieted and I hear praises rising up from the other side of the village. We've been singing a song all week with the children, and now I hear it resonating from the huts of the village. Some of us start laughing, while others gratefully weep in our tents.

Truly, as the song goes:

"My God, You are so BIG. You are so STRONG, and You are so MIGHTY. There is nothing you can't do. There is nothing you can't do. You are the hope, living in me, you are the hero in me."

Keep singing little ones, and transform this village for Jesus.