The girls, Noah and I left Colorado and headed north to say goodbye to beloved friends and family, before we left to join our men in Swaziland.
It had been years since we had visited.
The girls wanted to see their birth dad’s grave, and so one day we drove out into the country of Michigan. It was dark, cold, and windy…much like the day we buried John 11 years before.
The little girls that stood next to me that day were now grown ladies, tall, strong and beautiful.
I suppose I have blocked out that portion of my life because took us a good hour to find the spot where the shell where my first husband’s body lay.
The place is marked by a beautiful stone with his name, the dreaded date of passing, and a cross.
I stood and stared at it, it was dirty and covered with debris…I held my breath waiting on the girls’ reactions.
Alexis turned to me, with the same grace and peace she flows in everyday of her life.
“Mom” she whispered,
“I have no emotions right now, you are right, HE is not here, he is with Jesus, this is just a stone”
I hugged her and told her I was going back to the van to get warm and allow her and Emily time alone to express whatever they need to.
Emily did kneel there, her shoulder shook, and quietly she wept.
She needed this; her emotions were frozen for so many years, now she could release it all.
I was relieved.
Happy to be alone in the van, I turned the heat all the way up and waited to it to seep into my bones.
I watched as three of my children wandered through a graveyard.
Alexis and Emily cleaning off a tombstone with water and a rag, Noah running around, laughing, smacking the back of his sisters’ heads.
I smiled to myself. LIFE IN DEAD PLACES.
Noah, young, full of energy, all boy, and clueless to any real pain in the world. I do not want any thing unpleasant to enter his world, but how will he know the Father otherwise?
Today at a “hospital” in Swaziland, with these same children we held sick and abandoned babies, in a hot, tiny, hideous room.
There were flies and cockroaches in their cribs. Their bottles are propped up, there are no adoring mothers to rock and feed them.
The diapers are not changed often, there are no toys. All day they sit in this room, the ugly blue and green paint peeling around them is their only source of stimulation.
Alexis and Emily wept again when they had to leave the babies there on the floor, Noah seemed glad to leave. Tonight after bath time I tucked Noah in and started bedtime prayers.
I thought our day’s activities had gone right over his four year old head blonde head.
Then he prayed.
It was no simple prayer, it was a deep, and heart filled meditation.
He asked Jesus to protect the babies, to heal their bodies and to bring them mommies and daddies to love them…and then he asked for them to have toys, and most importantly, that they would all have their own bikes.
Noah, after all thinks a bike is the best gift in the world.
He does not pray for himself, and is keenly aware that all his own toys and belongings are in storage, including his cherished bike.
He is not too young to be broken for the hurting; he, like his siblings is beginning to understand his call…
His call after all is the same as yours and mine, to be Jesus to the world, to be LIFE IN DEAD PLACES….
