Life piles on you like trucks that arrive with more trash.
And sometimes, you forget to keep hoping that someday you will see a
difference.
From 2007-2009 I had the opportunity to work with almost 150
children at Living Stones in Paudalho, combined with the local government
program PETI (Program to Eradicate Working Children). But we didn’t just work
with at-risk children and their families, we worked with whoever walked through
the doors of the church.
One of those children, who wasn’t even registered with the
government, was Alexandra. A bushy-haired fireball that I personally kicked out
multiple times for violent behavior. Her mother was a prostitute in another
town. Her father was a drunk in another. She and her brother lived on the street
or in abandoned houses. She thinks she was born in 1996. She doesn’t know her
birthday.
When I first met her, she was (around) 11, and I wrote this:
“Alexandra always wear a dirty baseball cap. When we finally got it off her
head one day, we realized why—she had the worst case of head lice I have ever
seen, with open sores on her scalp. We find her decent clothes to wear, because
she runs around in a miniskirt and tube top. But she doesn’t have any soap to
wash them. She doesn’t know how to wash them even if she did. She does what she
can to get food, and is known for trading sexual favors for bubble gum.”
As she grew up, she came to Living Stones less frequently,
and in 2011 I heard she was pregnant. I went from house to house, asking where
she was, wanting to offer help. Her friends came back with different stories:
she tried to self-abort the baby. She was living with a woman who drank too
much. She was living with the family of the father of the baby. Every time I
went to the place they said she was, she had just left. And so I let it be.
But I continued praying for her. I ran into the father of
her baby once, who said the baby was alive and healthy. I asked people to pray,
I kept her picture on my wall. But I figured, as with many of the children,
that they had made decisions, and I had to let that go.
Four years passed since I last saw Alexandra. So when I
turned around in church, I was not looking for her face. But there she was,
glowing, as she called out “Tia Rachel!” and bounced her daughter on her knees.
I blinked first from surprise and then from tears as I ran to hug her, no
knowing where to start.
She and her daughter are healthy. They have a more permanent
home, and she is friends with a woman from church that brought her. Her smile
was real and her hair was the silky black it should be. Her daughter’s name is
Stephanie, and yes, she is happy and wants to keep learning more about Jesus.
And I couldn’t ask for more.
The children I work with might not turn out like I think
they should, but that doesn’t mean I failed, or God forgot. You never know what
God has planned. And over and over He taps me on the shoulder and grins,
saying, “See? I told you so. I told you I loved those children even more than
you do. I got this.”
