Extraordinary Love

“Uganda has a way of grabbing ahold of your heart and never letting go.” A woman spoke these  words to me a few weeks into my time here in Uganda, and I never have anticipated how true  these words would be.  

Spending my summer in Uganda is an act many have deemed extraordinary, marvelous, grand.  But the truth is that my work here has been small, simple, slow. 

I put on and take off the same shoes from little feet. I sweep rice off the floor. I read a story for  tiny ears. I wipe a table. I wipe a face. I do it all again.  

The only extraordinary act is Christ’s love for us. All that we do is merely our return of such love  to the King.  

This work was not, by the standard of this world, extraordinary. I stepped into a life here that  while it was very different from my life in the States, it was rather ordinary, all the same.  

I have come to embrace the words of St. Therese when she says: “my mission is love.” 

Love, I have come to find, often takes an ordinary shape. It looks like folding the laundry and  scooping up the toddler and taking tea. It looks like action and it looks like rest. It looks far less  grand than one might expect but it is far more beautiful.  

Perhaps, in all its simplicity, this mission of love is extraordinary. But not because of anything I  could ever say or do, because of what He has already done—for “it is finished”, after all.  

Perhaps, just perhaps, extraordinary love is found in ordinary time.  

Uganda has grabbed ahold of my heart, indeed. 

-Audrey Menck