“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” – C.S. Lewis
I have stopped journaling. In the past, the evasion of reflection was out of complacency, yet now I feel it is merely out of self-preservation. No words are raw enough, honest enough, to capture the heaviness of my spirit. Pressing memories snatch my breath and crowd any release that previously would have been possible. I find that most days I can’t even cry. I have become a salt composite of whimpered confessions, of wordless cries to God. I try to be present, to live in this moment, but my every other thought breathes Honduras, Honduras, Honduras.
I see their faces daily—their seeking velvet eyes, reaching hands, and hungry smiles so characteristic of my children, my orphans, my loves. Axel, my angel with a smudgy face and decaying teeth, had bumped his head on the concrete and screamed with the reckless desperation of knowing that, most often, no one cared. I scooped him into my arms and held him so close, his snot soaking my shoulder, that he was mine in those moments. I have never been a mother. I don’t know what that is like, but as a woman, I know that there was a sense that he was mine—that he had come from me and to me, a son born of my own surrender to the strained pain of real love.
Then, there was Tati, a three-year-old wonder with curly hair and a bouncing step. She crawled into my lap and showed me the marvels of her small fingers before peeing on my leg. She squealed with delight when she played with the few toys that all of the orphans of her house shared, and she led me around to introduce me to her shared bedroom.
Jasmine was the heartbreaker. Her hair was cropped short like most all of the girls to keep the lice at bay, and her face was demanding and melancholy for a six-year-old. Holding her hand, I tried to get her to play soccer with me and a few other children, but she just shook her head and sat down on the wall near the cancha. Although gangly, she crawled on top of my knees and buried her head just under my neck with all the violent persistence of a burrowing animal. The other children were swarming around me. José Luis, the little boy who never stopped smiling, was showing me a cut as his eyes danced and his lip poked forward. I gave him hugs and kissed his cut, only to look down at Jasmine staring straight into my eyes, her wrists exposed. A blood-dried cut slid across the soft flesh of each arm, and she began muttering in Spanish. She had tried to kill herself. Porque no quiero vivir sin una familia en este lugar. Six-years-old, trapped in a world of no home and no family, with nothing left to live for.
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“Come inside this heart of mine; it’s not my own. Make it home. Come and take this heart and make it all your own. Welcome home.” – Shaun Groves
The balmy day generally starts at six in the morning although the roosters start their dispirited crowing a few hours earlier. The cool smell of freshly washed laundry sloshed and slopped onto the line beneath the towering pines greets me as I emerge from the bunkhouse. There is the usual good morning ritual through the broken window of the boys’ side of the bunkhouse. I wander, smiling, into the kitchen already alive with movement from Amy and Nelanie, the two daughters of the missionaries, and Kevin and Bladimir, the two adopted sons. Mamí Nellie is still snug in bed, but Papí Alvin peers over the paper at the kitchen table as he thrusts eggs with beans and mantequilla into his mouth. Idaña, Mamí Nellie’s younger sister, uses a fork to flip the sizzling, yellow plátanos as they fry over the gas stove. Another one of the family, I help myself to the steaming black coffee and scavenge for whatever leftovers there may be for breakfast—rice and beans, last night’s spaghetti, toast, or Nicaraguan tortillas. Every morsel of food in Honduras tastes better than anything I’ve ever tasted here, but simplicity has a way of naturally leading to contentment. Even the daily cold showers offer a kind of jubilant revival.
Each morning following breakfast, I take my Bible and journal out to the front porch overlooking much of Villa Vieja and sit in a rocking chair, savoring the ever- present breeze and enjoying the noises of a house always full of people. There is the sound of Mamí’s music that fills the house from morning till night accompanied by her shrill call for Roy, another adopted son and young, live-in handyman. His gentle and faithful reply of “Mande!” echoes in return. Order me; send me.
The smell of diesel fuel and ripe mangoes, fried chicken and men’s hair gel waft to and fro as I pass through the various places of my Honduran life. The rolling white clouds against a perfectly deep blue sky and the steep mountains shadowed by trees keep me company as I wait to be told what to do for the day. Some days I take a public bus—an old U.S. school bus jam-packed with people standing, sitting, and hanging out the back doors—to the orphanage. Other days, I just tag along with Roy or Papí or the Danish volunteers.
I cradle orphans. I teach impoverished preschoolers at the feeding centers established in the mountains outside of the capital, and I visit with street kids and gang members in the worst part of the city. I pray with juvenile delinquents, help at the home for abused girls, and hand out food in the middle of the dump. And in the midst of all of this “doing,” I am humbled by the epic truth that what God is doing—how He is changing my heart—is far greater than any of my efforts. I am simply taking the time to know Him and let Him know me.
Honduras is not an easy place. By all realities and standards, Tegucigalpa, the capital, is a cavity of dust and hunger, pride and suffocating privilege, yet for those two short months, it was home. And for me, it remains home now.
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“Daddy, come get me. I want You to catch me again. I tagged You; You’re it. Daddy, play with me.” – Jason Upton
I work three jobs and spend time list-making, past-searching, future-dwelling, and waiting for sleep—all in an effort to forget and remember the weight of tears I cannot cry. It was the same in Honduras too although in a different way. The first time I ever went, ever met a child prostitute, ever had a high ten-year-old street boy jump into my arms, ever saw a boy my own age dying of AIDS on a mattress in the alley, I couldn’t cry. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t cry. Other people were, and I was ashamed because I was stunned into denial and silence. By the time I returned for a third trip, the tears found me in the middle of the dump of Tegucigalpa where 500 people lived and ate and worked in the scorching sun and decay of leather flesh, plastic waste, and rainless mud, fighting with cows, dogs, and vultures for human droppings. And there was a little girl—a soft, dirt-streaked niña shyly taking a bologna sandwich from my hand. And I broke, wondering if anyone had ever told her she was beautiful. We gave the children water, and they sucked it luxuriously, sometimes violently, from their plastic bags until they’d had their fill. With the extra, they began to play in the confetti-colored mounds of Fresca bottles, tires, and silvery discarded bags of yuca chips, squirting each other and squealing with hollowed, almost forgotten smiles. Children—just as we all are—who needed to play. Modern day Mary Magdalenes pouring out their oil of laughter, playing with Daddy.
I sat in the van as we meandered out of the abyss with ceaseless tears streaming down my face. I was angry, wondering how it was possible for God not to hate us. “How dare we live the way we do in the U.S. when there are people suffering as they are in this place?” It was too overwhelming to lie to myself about how I could help. All I could pray was, “Father, please give me a heart so willing that if You called me to live in that place as those people, loving them as You do in the midst of that struggle, that I would leave my place of comfort to live as they do and love as You do.”
I love garbage day when the Waste Management trucks open their caged mouths to feed themselves with the castoffs of college students. The sharp, sour smell pervades the air as the molecules disperse over my face and into my nose. I smile every time, reminded of home, relishing Honduras.
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“You belong to Me, and no one will ever snatch you from my hand. I have changed your name. No longer will you be called ashamed, guilt-ridden, lonely, and much-afraid. Your new name is ‘child of mine, broken and beloved, playful one and joy of my heart.’” – Brendan Manning
An ocean of lapping, seasick waves, guilt rarely destroys in bursts. Rather, with each wash over your soul and your circumstances, it erodes away at the very core of your being until grain by grain you’ve lost yourself. I nearly lost myself a couple months before going to Honduras, to a relationship that filled my world with overthinking, fear, and regret, crowding out the light of hope and independent ambition. Driven by guilt, each small decision to ignore obvious manipulation, to succumb to twisted treatment, and to quietly allow myself to be defined by another, chipped away at my sensibilities and self-worth. I escaped from my self-imposed prison just in time. Yet the remnants of unspoken protests and strongholds of control followed me to the sunny warmth of Tegus.
I had frequent nightmares. He was following me, and he was angry. I ran all over the contours of my subconscious, but he caught me, and I lost myself all over again. With each nightmare, my body responded with physical anguish—a clogged, sore throat when I woke the next morning, throbbing ears, and a crusty cough. It was as if he had followed me, still determined to possess me, yet it wasn’t him at all. I wanted to forgive him, cutting the strings of begrudged attachment, and I wanted to forgive myself. Yet all I could do was lay curled in my bed, begging God to fix me—to know me and expose the root of the wound, so He could heal it. As the weeks moved on, it became easier to breathe as the burden slowly lifted, until I was a hot air balloon no longer tied down to the ground of my past.
Still the incense of disrespect lingered, leaving me burnt and fearful. A blonde, white woman in Honduras cannot hide from machismo. It was present everyday in the hissing of the men outside of the grocery store, in the smacking of puckered lips as we drove through Comayaguela with my face visible, and in the propositions of dirty old neighbor men. Men shouted to me in English and Spanish, slowing their cars as they drove by me. One serenaded me with a James Blunt song from his truck, and another grabbed my hand on the bus. Walking alone up our road was always a test of my own will to reject unwanted attention and protect myself. Having a soft heart—or perhaps one used to guilt-induced trampling—I often failed, rescued by someone from the house. I was a china plate, admired yet ripe for crashing. Once again, I had become something someone only wanted to possess.
Too many days I returned home angry—not mad at the man who had manipulated his way into a conversation, but at myself for being kind when he was being vulgar. Yet I didn’t know how to remedy my response and once again did all I knew to do—surrendered it to the God who could search the deep recesses of my heart when I was blind, lost in the dark of self.
My favorite Spanish worship song learned during my first trip to Honduras is called, “La Niña de Tus Ojos,” “The Girl of Your Eyes.” Me viste a mí cuando nadie me vio. You saw me when no one saw me. Me amaste a mí cuando nadie me llamó. You loved me when no one called me. Y me diste nombre. And You gave me a name. Yo soy tu niña. I am Your little girl. La niña de tus ojos porque me amaste a mí. The girl of Your eyes because You loved me.
Being the firstborn daughter to my father, Joe, I have always been a daddy’s girl. There is a certain power in the realization of belonging to a father. There’s an untapped freedom that emerges when a daughter realizes that her father will protect her, embracing her with comfort and shielding her as best he can from the evils of the world. There are no worries of self-protection because of the strong father. Eventually, though, daughters grow up in the dizzying autonomy of almost adulthood, and human fathers can’t fight all the battles any more.
It was in Honduras, though, that I realized the power of being the daughter of a Heavenly Father. When you catch a glimpse of the depth of His love for you, it changes everything. You begin to see yourself through the lens of a Father beaming with pride over His small daughter, leaving the pressures of worldly beauty behind because you know that He thinks you’re worthy of His love. Liberty seeps from the acknowledgement that you don’t have to protect yourself because an omniscient, trustworthy Being is holding you. Regardless of what calamities may befall you, He is the only one fully in control, orchestrating life stories of love for His greater good.
If I belong to Him, I needn’t feel guilty when I stumble into manipulation. If I belong to Him, I don’t have to fear that another will snatch me from His hands. If I belong to Him, I can believe that I am worth more than the way I have been treated in the past. And I do belong to Him.
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“Sweet Lorraine, fiery-haired, brown-eyed schemer who came from a long line of drinkers and dreamers . . . Her father would tear out like a page of the Bible. Then he’d burn down the house to announce his arrival. Her mother was working and never was home. Lorraine carved out a little life of her own. . . . In the battle of time, in the battle of will, it’s only your hope and your heart that gets killed, and it gets harder and harder, Lorraine, to believe in magic when what came before you was so very tragic.” – Patty Griffin
Names are important. I would know; my last name is Crickenberger. I distinctly remember the tedious task of learning how to spell my last name. I also remember the frustration of politely putting up with those all-too-common nicknames of “chicken burger” and other equally unoriginal creations. My first name, on the other hand, is quite common—Sarah. If my name is said in any public place, at least three other girls are likely to turn around. I don’t even answer to it any more. I’m more likely to respond to my oddly appropriate nickname of “Cricket.” I say all of this because there is something both very foreign and very defining about a name. Sometimes, I hear someone call my name, and for just a second, I wonder who she is. That collection of sounds and syllables does not seem to signify who I am at all. It doesn’t tell the story of my soul, yet from the mouths of strangers, it’s all I have.
I met a young lady in Honduras who was 15-years-old who had learned to write her name only a week before I met her. She was a tiny thing afraid to smile most days until she was able to spend enough time to trust you. She had two younger sisters—Olga and another sister whose name bore an uncanny resemblance to her own. We had a terrible time trying to correctly identify them, especially since neither of them knew how to write their names. Their own mother, having only a second grade education, couldn’t spell their names.
For a while, they both lived at the Eagle’s Nest, a home for abused and neglected young ladies that at the time was housing four other girls. One of the other girls, Stefani, used her prior schooling and phonetic knowledge to teach the oldest daughter how to spell her name: K-E-N-D-I.
Kendi had been sexually abused by her own father daily for years. She was afraid of men yet still craved their attention desperately. She had only finished the first grade since she lived in the most impoverished area of Tegus, in the rocky hills. Alvin arranged for her to live at the Eagle’s Nest where she was cared for by Tía Sally, a 70-year-old, no-nonsense lady from Michigan who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and Tía Sara, a boisterous Nicaraguan woman who carried the burden of communicating with all of the girls of the house.
I had difficulty with Kendi and was brokenhearted because of it. She had a habit of hanging on everyone—constant skin touching skin, arms slung over shoulders in vice grips, and relentless clingy trailing. She never stood up for herself when Kevin and Bladi picked on her, and she refused to do anything by herself or to be around new people. Realistically, she was just getting used to life. Her face lit up by the magic of the stove. She was initially confused yet blessed by indoor plumbing, taking long, luxurious showers despite the frigid water. She was a leech—thirsty for knowledge, starving for attention, and recklessly in need of love.
The harshest reality of Kendi hit me when I realized my ghastly lack of empathy for her. The conviction of our kinship opened my eyes to myself as well as to her struggles. To be blunt, the things I saw in Kendi that bothered me were the very things I didn’t want to face in myself. Her tendency to latch onto anyone willing to give her some measure of love. Her unbridled craving for human contact—to know that she was worthy of such a thing. Her inability to stand up for herself. Kendi and I were sisters of insecurity struggles, and once my heart was opened to this fact, the bond between us was inescapable. How could I not grant grace to a younger, more troubled extension of my own soul? As the week trod onward, Kendi stole ever-widening places of my heart, and whether either of us was aware of it at the time, we grew together.
It wasn’t until Alvin retrieved Kendi’s papers to gain custody of her, to save her from her abusive parents, that we finally discovered her true, legal name: Quendy. Q-U-E-N-D-Y. To her, though, that will never be her name. Her name resides in that first step toward independence when she learned to write her own representation, when she began her journey toward physical and emotional freedom, when she was finally able to choose to depict herself—aside from her past.
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“But God wants me to find my satisfaction in wells in a famished land, not the river of a fat one.” – Jim Elliot
My roommates and I just bought a Brita water pitcher—the kind that purifies the spews of the Potomac that rush from our tap. I used to drink the water here simply because I was too cheap to buy water bottles. The pitcher is a vast improvement to our lives though. I find it keeps me company in those hot nights when I’ve slept with too many layers on and wake with flushed cheeks and a prickly throat. Any foul aftertaste is only an imagined, remaining memory imprint from water tasting past.
You can’t drink the water in Honduras. Well, not the tap water anyway. They tell us gringos not to cook or brush our teeth with it either, but after a while, you get tired of toting water from the main house to the bunk house. So you learn to live like a catracho, thrusting your minty covered bristles under the faucet’s cascade.
“Honduras means ‘deep waters,’ you know. When Columbus landed on the shores of Honduras he said, ‘Thanks be to God who got us safely across these deep waters’—Honduras,” Papí Alvin had said in the van one day as we jolted along the rocky terrain they use as roads in Comayaguela.
The rain in Honduras is a resident titan. In the rainy season, you can set your watch by the torrents, and slivers of water turn into muddy rivers in the roads within a matter of minutes. With our tin roofs overhead, conversation was drowned by din and shatter, and we talked with our eyes, sipping water at the kitchen table.
I was spoiled in Honduras. We drank purified water every day from neon-colored, plastic cups. The water was sweet and the temperature of the room. When I returned, I couldn’t weather the slosh from the tap with its fecal taste and metal smell. And still, it seems, no matter how it’s sifted or strained, packaged or flavored, the water here gives no hydrating life.
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“Oh gently lay your head upon My chest, and I will comfort you like a mother while you rest. The tide can change so fast, but I will stay the same through past, same in future, same today. I am constant. I am near. I am peace that shatters all your secret fears. I am holy. I am wise. I am the only one who knows your heart’s desires.” – Jill Phillips
We entered the dingy hospital room, armed with baby blankets and diapers, onezies and socks, ready to help the new mothers of Hospital Escuela. Being the cheapest hospital in the city, women who have nothing go there to have their babies and leave with nothing but a crying bundle. The women were worn and most often alone—with no male present to hold them or help them. In Honduras, culturally, babies are only the responsibility of the mother.
Women covered themselves with ragged sheets even as many were still bleeding. Their faces were flushed in the hot rooms as rare breezes blew through the open windows, and their stringy hair stuck to their faces. Bulging breasts emerged for hungry newborns, and our small group meandered through the room visiting each proud mother. Many were teenagers. We prayed with each, giving her things for her baby. We heard beautiful names and stroked thick, silky baby hair and held tiny, supple fingers.
And, in the middle of the room, we stumbled upon her—a middle-aged woman curled on her bed that was wet with tears. The heaviness of her sorrow permeated the room. Her name was María, and she had lost her baby. After carrying her fourth child for the full pregnancy, it was still-born. The emptiness of her arms in the midst of a room full of wailing newness left us in tears. The six of us women of various ages gathered around her, holding her hands, stroking her graying hair, and speaking words of comfort, although our collective tears spoke greater volumes. We prayed for her in Spanish and English and gave her the name of one of the missionaries she could call if she needed anything.
One of the women of our group, Jamie, had also lost a child many years before. As she cried with the woman and shared her story, there was a peace that fell—not a total removal of heartache, but the lightening of a shared burden. There is a certain unspeakable power in womanhood. It resides in the ability to be unified in brokenness, surrendering pride and sharing pain. On that day, it was a nurturing power that knew no language barriers.
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“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” – Matthew 9:14
A plumber and carpenter by trade, a young Alvin Anderson squatted on a bucket on the precarious hillside with sandwiches in hand. It was his lunch break from the construction job in the hills of Tegucigalpa. The children of the neighborhood pushed closer to him, to the fringes of his presence. They had desperate eyes and underdeveloped bones, and they scampered ever closer like probing sparrows. Being the kind of man who treats every child as if she is his own, he invited them to his outstretched hands, to eat of his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This encounter, which grew in frequency, was the spark that started the feeding centers.
Now, years later, the giant pot of rice brims, and the stacks of tortillas sit neatly on the table, awaiting their homes in grimy hands and empty stomachs. The children close their long-lashed eyes and place their folded hands against their small faces as they are led in a group blessing for the food. They line up at the kitchen window with their plastic cups and makeshift bowls that siblings often share. Protective sisters make sure their baby brothers don’t spill their sausages while seated children roll their tortillas for eating. Hundreds of children are fed every Saturday at the two yellow feeding centers that tower high above the trickles of homes and jolting roads below. The centers serve as cafeterias and churches on Saturdays and trade schools and daycares on weekdays where preschool children are taught, and they, along with their sponsored older siblings, are fed.
Every Saturday, they hear a lesson from the Bible and sing songs, rejoicing for Jesus who is portrayed intimately to them through the love of Alvin Anderson. All he did was see a need and meet it, giving all that he had—all that God had provided. And through the tenderness of his heart and the obedience of his actions, he is changing the world by feeding and educating one Honduran child at a time. In a forgotten area, rampant with physical and sexual abuse as well as gang involvement, often the seed of love that Alvin and his helpers plant in each small child will be the only chance that child has for a hopeful future.
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“It’s the beauty of simplicity that brings me down to my knees . . . It’s the beauty of simplicity that fills me with eternity.” – Telecast
Hondurans, like many Latin Americans, love soccer. The whole country shuts down when the game is on and their team is playing. It seems that every Honduran—including the tiniest babies—sport blue and white jerseys to show their national pride. While I was in Honduras, the World Cup Semi-finals were taking place, and the United States and Honduras played each other a few times.
Watching the fútbol game isn’t just a family event; it is a neighborhood custom. At the Andersons’ house, we didn’t have a television that we could watch the game on, so we all piled into the car in the pouring rain to go to the house of Brenda and Geraldo. Brenda helped with cleaning, cooking, and laundry around our house while Geraldo was Alvin’s gruff and sloppy handyman. In the stuffy cement house with four rooms, concentrating on the small, grainy television screen, were Brenda and Geraldo and their five children, Nellie, Amy, Nelanie, Kevin, Bladimir, Roy, his brother Raúl, Anja and Torben (Danish volunteers), at least four neighbor kids, and me. Everyone was quiet and attentive when the game was on, and the sheer joy on the faces of the Hondurans when their team scored was enough to swallow the sun. Anja had brought two pear pies, a standard Danish dessert, to share with everyone. And as I helped her cut twenty-one neat slices so everyone would have a piece to eat out of the palm of his or her hand, I found myself overwhelmed by tears of joy, thinking, “This is how I want to spend the rest of my life.”
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"If you've ever known the love of God, you know it's nothing but reckless, and it's nothing but raging. Sometimes it hurts to be loved, and if it doesn't hurt it's probably not love, maybe infatuation. I think a lot of American people are infatuated with God, but we don't really love Him, and they don't really let Him love them. Being loved by God is one of the most painful things in the world; it's also the only thing that can bring us salvation, and it's like everything else that is really wonderful—there's a little bit of pain in it, little bit of hurt.” -- Rich Mullins
Murderers, thieves, and gang members smoothed their wrinkled skirts and wiped mascara-streaked tears from their faces. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back. Holding hands, these young women hung their heads with the silent sorrow of weary pasts. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back. They hugged each other, listening to the song that sang their hearts. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back.
From the second I stepped into their prayer and worship circle, I was one of them. A murderer, thief, and gang member. Although I wasn’t enclosed in a concrete and metal prison, I was captive in my own doubt of His love. I murdered His sacrifice by rebelliously trying to earn His love. I stole His gift of life with my own wasting of precious time. I joined the brutal ranks of the complacent. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back.
As I looked on the faces of the juvenile delinquent girls before me, I saw myself in their shining eyes, and words began to congregate in my mind. Lift up your head, My daughter. I told the girl next to me between my own quaking sobs. You are My princess, a child of the King. They were my sisters, broken yet beloved, and so in tune with my own struggle.
There is no greater pain than accepting the real love of Christ because you have to lose yourself. You can no longer hide behind fear and doubt when He makes Himself real to you. You can no longer convince yourself that you are unworthy or that your past sins are too much for Him to handle. Murderers, thieves, and gang members, suburbanites, politicians, and town drunks, are all children of the King. And when we fully discover this truth, as was inescapable that day at Sacred Heart and Rebirth Juvenile Detention Centers, there is no truly going back. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back.
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“You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.” – Matthew 5:4
Victoria, my Nicaraguan roommate for a few weeks, looked at the water in the floor with the wild eyes of a frightened mare. She tugged on my sleeve and began her speech of Nicaraguan English with a rhythm reminiscent of witches standing over cauldrons reciting spells. Her voice sounded thick like bubble gum, and her gold teeth flashed with every syllable. She was quite worried about the puddle in the floor of our bathroom hallway immediately outside of our showers. I reasoned that the grout was leaky, but she swore there was some other dire problem. Tucking her frizzled gray hair behind her ears, she began mopping after promptly calling for Roy.
Although I’d been there roughly a week or so, I hadn’t really noticed him until that moment—that frightful moment that filled me with a kind of inexplicable awe. He was hunched over our shower drain, peering intently, before he reached into the filmy water with bare fingers collecting the fibrous, soapy mass of scum and human hair from its stubborn position of clogging the drain.
In Martin 201, our humble college abode, we fight over who will clean out the shower drain. It is the most shirked chore of our household. Nikki flat-out refuses to look at it. I’ve cleaned the drain once, gagging every second of every tug, and Blair, brave soul that she is, confronts the collection of blonde, brown, and reddish strands more than the rest of us. What would ever possess a man to scour a drain for total strangers—shedding females at that? Yet he did every task he was asked to do, for little or no pay, with a brimming grin of contentment and a servant’s heart so apparent it was nearly touchable.
I don’t talk about Roy often. My face and voice betray me when I do.
Our friendship began with a mínimo—an unexpectedly shared lunch thrust into my stubborn hands—and flourished to include Spanish conversations of Teddy Roosevelt and motor bikes, church and children. A miraculous chipping away at an invisible language barrier. We visited as we did our laundry. Roy bit the side of his lip every time he scrubbed his shirts against the washboard of the outdoor pila, scattering fresh, white suds onto my sweatshirt with a sideways, playful glance. We walked to the pulpería, eating homemade coconut popsicles called paletas, and he introduced me to all of his friends in Villa Vieja, our neighborhood. He taught me how to wash dusty windows with old newspapers, and I patiently taught him English phrases, syllable by syllable. Amidst the afternoon bustle of Nicaraguan ladies in the matriarchal kitchen, I made him bologna sandwiches, and he shared his deep fried pastelitos. Perched on the wall around the cancha, I watched him play fútbol with the neighborhood muchachos, and he watched me scoop up children at the feeding centers.
We did all of his mandatos together—mudding a new cement wall, carrying bags of dirt, cleaning the van, and shopping for the household. We played with orphans together, haggled over groceries together, and did dishes together. He invited me everywhere he was ordered to go, and each time I gladly accompanied him, he thanked me for my companionship. Roy quietly protected me, and despite his lack of an imposing nature, no man challenged his silent guard. When we went our separate ways, doing our daily separate tasks, we found excitement in the opportunity to share the stories of the day with each other.
We sat for hours at the kitchen table talking against the dark, breeze-blown background of the boys’ play and Mamí’s music. I voiced my frustration over being objectified and disrespected by men, and he told me about his father leaving his family when he was seven-years-old. After he’d given blood to a sick, old abuelo, we prayed together outside the bunkhouse, petitioning for the old man’s health in each of our languages.
There was a stillness between us, a communication that mocked the frailties of language, that surpassed the tickling of words. I didn’t notice it all at once—it was a mystery that unfolded without my knowledge. We’d exchange a look—a gaze of brown and blue—that made me look again, knowing I had missed something, knowing I had only seen a hint of some hidden beauty. There were smiles of unspoken words and an overwhelming richness of sweet gratitude for another person that I had never known before. In our steady serving movement, in our mutually surrendered hearts, in our daring dreams, in the pain of leaving, in the anticipation of God’s mysterious future, there was a joy of finally finding home.
In essence, we shared it all, and when we said our quick goodbyes after a month of age-old friendship, his tears were contagious, and we shared those too.
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“Come up here; come up now, My beloved. My beloved. You said, ‘Come up here; come up now, My beloved. My beloved.’ I want to fly, oh Lord, like an eagle in the sky. I want to fly, oh Lord, through that doorway in the sky. Here I come, oh Lord. Here I come, oh Lord. . . . in the midst, in the midst of heartache, oh God. In the midst, in the midst of brokenness, oh Lord.” – Jason Upton
Papí Alvin has made many friends over the years, and he remembers every name, every year that he met every person, every story. He collects each little lamb with sweeping, open arms. One such friend is Julio Ruby, a man confined to a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy. Julio, a former singer and musician, lives in Tegus with his wife, Bessy, a fellow singer and musician. As Julio has gotten weaker over the years, it has become more and more difficult for Bessy to lift him out of bed to set him in his wheelchair. Because of this fact, Julio often had to stay in bed for days until Alvin knew of their trouble. Now, Alvin either travels every day to lift Julio out of bed, or he sends Roy to do so.
One day, when Alvin was out of town, Roy was headed to Julio’s, and since I hadn’t met them, I asked to go along. When we reached their cramped home perched along a lane of mangled concrete, I patiently waited with their yipping dogs as Roy lifted Julio out of bed and helped Bessy dress him. When he finally emerged into the poorly lit living room, we had a wonderful conversation in Spanish of his music and his past, singing and sharing God’s love with others. Roy, who is usually swamped with chores and errands, had never heard his music, so we both took the time to stay and listen to tape after tape of love songs, odes to Honduras, and worship music all in Bessy’s sweet soprano and Julio’s soulful crooning. We were both truly blessed. Before we left, they wanted to pray for me. This couple—who rarely see the light of day except through slit windows, who must rely on others for basic living, who spend their hours remembering the past before the toll of muscular dystrophy—took my hands and prayed for me. I have never been more humbled.
After that cherished encounter, I wanted to give a guitar to Bessy so that they could again make music together. My brother, Samuel, and a woman who is like a second mother to me, Cheryl, were slated to arrive toward the end of my time in Honduras, and Cheryl had a guitar she was willing to give away. When I told her of Bessy, she agreed with my ambition. The day after they arrived, Roy took us and another volunteer, Danielle, to their home.
We gave them the guitar and watched their faces melt with happiness. We were shocked when Bessy thrust the guitar into Cheryl’s hands and asked her to play. She began by playing the song “Come Up Here” by Jason Upton, which aptly talks of soaring to God to be in His presence. As she sang, we all began to feel the subtle mist of God’s presence, reflecting light in that dark, dirty place, cluttered with old pictures and old memories. Soon, one song wove into another until it was nothing more than careful strumming and soft, angelic voices singing their own hymns of worship to God. We didn’t all speak the same language, but we sang the same language of passion for His presence—a breathless hallelujah. My brother couldn’t speak. Roy held his face in his hands as tears streamed down his cheeks. The beauty of a song that wasn’t ours captured our hearts in the purest worship encounter I’ve ever been a part of.
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“And you say, ‘Be still, my love. Open up your heart. Let the light shine in. Don’t you understand, I already have a plan?’ I’m waiting for my real life to begin.” – Colin Hay
A member of a short-term mission team from South Carolina, my good friend, Beth, told me before she left Honduras, “Don’t be afraid to let yourself be loved.” I had only known her for a week, yet she seared to the very nucleus of my struggle. I had always prided myself on being an independent untouchable, a strong and self-sufficient woman, yet life had exposed my fragility, leading me to a magnificent inevitability. I fell in love in Honduras—with a dearest who knows every detail of every one of my heart’s desires, with a sweet writer who takes each of the loose strings of ink from my life story and ties together an all-encompassing mystery of benevolence. I used to say Honduras had my heart, but the truth is that I gave my heart to my Creator, to the One who already knew it best.
I didn’t want to leave Honduras. I cried every day for the last two weeks out of stubborn fear that I would lose all of the best things I had found in life. Yet I have learned that to truly walk in love and through love, moving in its fluidity, breathing in its amber sweetness, you have to surrender control. Romance is not predictable. The thrill resides in the wonder and breathless anticipation of endless possibilities driven by divine love.
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“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” – Isaiah 6:8
I have stopped journaling. In the past, the evasion of reflection was out of complacency, yet now I feel it is merely out of self-preservation. No words are raw enough, honest enough, to capture the heaviness of my spirit. Pressing memories snatch my breath and crowd any release that previously would have been possible. I find that most days I can’t even cry. I have become a salt composite of whimpered confessions, of wordless cries to God. I try to be present, to live in this moment, but my every other thought breathes Honduras, Honduras, Honduras.
I see their faces daily—their seeking velvet eyes, reaching hands, and hungry smiles so characteristic of my children, my orphans, my loves. Axel, my angel with a smudgy face and decaying teeth, had bumped his head on the concrete and screamed with the reckless desperation of knowing that, most often, no one cared. I scooped him into my arms and held him so close, his snot soaking my shoulder, that he was mine in those moments. I have never been a mother. I don’t know what that is like, but as a woman, I know that there was a sense that he was mine—that he had come from me and to me, a son born of my own surrender to the strained pain of real love.
Then, there was Tati, a three-year-old wonder with curly hair and a bouncing step. She crawled into my lap and showed me the marvels of her small fingers before peeing on my leg. She squealed with delight when she played with the few toys that all of the orphans of her house shared, and she led me around to introduce me to her shared bedroom.
Jasmine was the heartbreaker. Her hair was cropped short like most all of the girls to keep the lice at bay, and her face was demanding and melancholy for a six-year-old. Holding her hand, I tried to get her to play soccer with me and a few other children, but she just shook her head and sat down on the wall near the cancha. Although gangly, she crawled on top of my knees and buried her head just under my neck with all the violent persistence of a burrowing animal. The other children were swarming around me. José Luis, the little boy who never stopped smiling, was showing me a cut as his eyes danced and his lip poked forward. I gave him hugs and kissed his cut, only to look down at Jasmine staring straight into my eyes, her wrists exposed. A blood-dried cut slid across the soft flesh of each arm, and she began muttering in Spanish. She had tried to kill herself. Porque no quiero vivir sin una familia en este lugar. Six-years-old, trapped in a world of no home and no family, with nothing left to live for.
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“Come inside this heart of mine; it’s not my own. Make it home. Come and take this heart and make it all your own. Welcome home.” – Shaun Groves
The balmy day generally starts at six in the morning although the roosters start their dispirited crowing a few hours earlier. The cool smell of freshly washed laundry sloshed and slopped onto the line beneath the towering pines greets me as I emerge from the bunkhouse. There is the usual good morning ritual through the broken window of the boys’ side of the bunkhouse. I wander, smiling, into the kitchen already alive with movement from Amy and Nelanie, the two daughters of the missionaries, and Kevin and Bladimir, the two adopted sons. Mamí Nellie is still snug in bed, but Papí Alvin peers over the paper at the kitchen table as he thrusts eggs with beans and mantequilla into his mouth. Idaña, Mamí Nellie’s younger sister, uses a fork to flip the sizzling, yellow plátanos as they fry over the gas stove. Another one of the family, I help myself to the steaming black coffee and scavenge for whatever leftovers there may be for breakfast—rice and beans, last night’s spaghetti, toast, or Nicaraguan tortillas. Every morsel of food in Honduras tastes better than anything I’ve ever tasted here, but simplicity has a way of naturally leading to contentment. Even the daily cold showers offer a kind of jubilant revival.
Each morning following breakfast, I take my Bible and journal out to the front porch overlooking much of Villa Vieja and sit in a rocking chair, savoring the ever- present breeze and enjoying the noises of a house always full of people. There is the sound of Mamí’s music that fills the house from morning till night accompanied by her shrill call for Roy, another adopted son and young, live-in handyman. His gentle and faithful reply of “Mande!” echoes in return. Order me; send me.
The smell of diesel fuel and ripe mangoes, fried chicken and men’s hair gel waft to and fro as I pass through the various places of my Honduran life. The rolling white clouds against a perfectly deep blue sky and the steep mountains shadowed by trees keep me company as I wait to be told what to do for the day. Some days I take a public bus—an old U.S. school bus jam-packed with people standing, sitting, and hanging out the back doors—to the orphanage. Other days, I just tag along with Roy or Papí or the Danish volunteers.
I cradle orphans. I teach impoverished preschoolers at the feeding centers established in the mountains outside of the capital, and I visit with street kids and gang members in the worst part of the city. I pray with juvenile delinquents, help at the home for abused girls, and hand out food in the middle of the dump. And in the midst of all of this “doing,” I am humbled by the epic truth that what God is doing—how He is changing my heart—is far greater than any of my efforts. I am simply taking the time to know Him and let Him know me.
Honduras is not an easy place. By all realities and standards, Tegucigalpa, the capital, is a cavity of dust and hunger, pride and suffocating privilege, yet for those two short months, it was home. And for me, it remains home now.
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“Daddy, come get me. I want You to catch me again. I tagged You; You’re it. Daddy, play with me.” – Jason Upton
I work three jobs and spend time list-making, past-searching, future-dwelling, and waiting for sleep—all in an effort to forget and remember the weight of tears I cannot cry. It was the same in Honduras too although in a different way. The first time I ever went, ever met a child prostitute, ever had a high ten-year-old street boy jump into my arms, ever saw a boy my own age dying of AIDS on a mattress in the alley, I couldn’t cry. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t cry. Other people were, and I was ashamed because I was stunned into denial and silence. By the time I returned for a third trip, the tears found me in the middle of the dump of Tegucigalpa where 500 people lived and ate and worked in the scorching sun and decay of leather flesh, plastic waste, and rainless mud, fighting with cows, dogs, and vultures for human droppings. And there was a little girl—a soft, dirt-streaked niña shyly taking a bologna sandwich from my hand. And I broke, wondering if anyone had ever told her she was beautiful. We gave the children water, and they sucked it luxuriously, sometimes violently, from their plastic bags until they’d had their fill. With the extra, they began to play in the confetti-colored mounds of Fresca bottles, tires, and silvery discarded bags of yuca chips, squirting each other and squealing with hollowed, almost forgotten smiles. Children—just as we all are—who needed to play. Modern day Mary Magdalenes pouring out their oil of laughter, playing with Daddy.
I sat in the van as we meandered out of the abyss with ceaseless tears streaming down my face. I was angry, wondering how it was possible for God not to hate us. “How dare we live the way we do in the U.S. when there are people suffering as they are in this place?” It was too overwhelming to lie to myself about how I could help. All I could pray was, “Father, please give me a heart so willing that if You called me to live in that place as those people, loving them as You do in the midst of that struggle, that I would leave my place of comfort to live as they do and love as You do.”
I love garbage day when the Waste Management trucks open their caged mouths to feed themselves with the castoffs of college students. The sharp, sour smell pervades the air as the molecules disperse over my face and into my nose. I smile every time, reminded of home, relishing Honduras.
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“You belong to Me, and no one will ever snatch you from my hand. I have changed your name. No longer will you be called ashamed, guilt-ridden, lonely, and much-afraid. Your new name is ‘child of mine, broken and beloved, playful one and joy of my heart.’” – Brendan Manning
An ocean of lapping, seasick waves, guilt rarely destroys in bursts. Rather, with each wash over your soul and your circumstances, it erodes away at the very core of your being until grain by grain you’ve lost yourself. I nearly lost myself a couple months before going to Honduras, to a relationship that filled my world with overthinking, fear, and regret, crowding out the light of hope and independent ambition. Driven by guilt, each small decision to ignore obvious manipulation, to succumb to twisted treatment, and to quietly allow myself to be defined by another, chipped away at my sensibilities and self-worth. I escaped from my self-imposed prison just in time. Yet the remnants of unspoken protests and strongholds of control followed me to the sunny warmth of Tegus.
I had frequent nightmares. He was following me, and he was angry. I ran all over the contours of my subconscious, but he caught me, and I lost myself all over again. With each nightmare, my body responded with physical anguish—a clogged, sore throat when I woke the next morning, throbbing ears, and a crusty cough. It was as if he had followed me, still determined to possess me, yet it wasn’t him at all. I wanted to forgive him, cutting the strings of begrudged attachment, and I wanted to forgive myself. Yet all I could do was lay curled in my bed, begging God to fix me—to know me and expose the root of the wound, so He could heal it. As the weeks moved on, it became easier to breathe as the burden slowly lifted, until I was a hot air balloon no longer tied down to the ground of my past.
Still the incense of disrespect lingered, leaving me burnt and fearful. A blonde, white woman in Honduras cannot hide from machismo. It was present everyday in the hissing of the men outside of the grocery store, in the smacking of puckered lips as we drove through Comayaguela with my face visible, and in the propositions of dirty old neighbor men. Men shouted to me in English and Spanish, slowing their cars as they drove by me. One serenaded me with a James Blunt song from his truck, and another grabbed my hand on the bus. Walking alone up our road was always a test of my own will to reject unwanted attention and protect myself. Having a soft heart—or perhaps one used to guilt-induced trampling—I often failed, rescued by someone from the house. I was a china plate, admired yet ripe for crashing. Once again, I had become something someone only wanted to possess.
Too many days I returned home angry—not mad at the man who had manipulated his way into a conversation, but at myself for being kind when he was being vulgar. Yet I didn’t know how to remedy my response and once again did all I knew to do—surrendered it to the God who could search the deep recesses of my heart when I was blind, lost in the dark of self.
My favorite Spanish worship song learned during my first trip to Honduras is called, “La Niña de Tus Ojos,” “The Girl of Your Eyes.” Me viste a mí cuando nadie me vio. You saw me when no one saw me. Me amaste a mí cuando nadie me llamó. You loved me when no one called me. Y me diste nombre. And You gave me a name. Yo soy tu niña. I am Your little girl. La niña de tus ojos porque me amaste a mí. The girl of Your eyes because You loved me.
Being the firstborn daughter to my father, Joe, I have always been a daddy’s girl. There is a certain power in the realization of belonging to a father. There’s an untapped freedom that emerges when a daughter realizes that her father will protect her, embracing her with comfort and shielding her as best he can from the evils of the world. There are no worries of self-protection because of the strong father. Eventually, though, daughters grow up in the dizzying autonomy of almost adulthood, and human fathers can’t fight all the battles any more.
It was in Honduras, though, that I realized the power of being the daughter of a Heavenly Father. When you catch a glimpse of the depth of His love for you, it changes everything. You begin to see yourself through the lens of a Father beaming with pride over His small daughter, leaving the pressures of worldly beauty behind because you know that He thinks you’re worthy of His love. Liberty seeps from the acknowledgement that you don’t have to protect yourself because an omniscient, trustworthy Being is holding you. Regardless of what calamities may befall you, He is the only one fully in control, orchestrating life stories of love for His greater good.
If I belong to Him, I needn’t feel guilty when I stumble into manipulation. If I belong to Him, I don’t have to fear that another will snatch me from His hands. If I belong to Him, I can believe that I am worth more than the way I have been treated in the past. And I do belong to Him.
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“Sweet Lorraine, fiery-haired, brown-eyed schemer who came from a long line of drinkers and dreamers . . . Her father would tear out like a page of the Bible. Then he’d burn down the house to announce his arrival. Her mother was working and never was home. Lorraine carved out a little life of her own. . . . In the battle of time, in the battle of will, it’s only your hope and your heart that gets killed, and it gets harder and harder, Lorraine, to believe in magic when what came before you was so very tragic.” – Patty Griffin
Names are important. I would know; my last name is Crickenberger. I distinctly remember the tedious task of learning how to spell my last name. I also remember the frustration of politely putting up with those all-too-common nicknames of “chicken burger” and other equally unoriginal creations. My first name, on the other hand, is quite common—Sarah. If my name is said in any public place, at least three other girls are likely to turn around. I don’t even answer to it any more. I’m more likely to respond to my oddly appropriate nickname of “Cricket.” I say all of this because there is something both very foreign and very defining about a name. Sometimes, I hear someone call my name, and for just a second, I wonder who she is. That collection of sounds and syllables does not seem to signify who I am at all. It doesn’t tell the story of my soul, yet from the mouths of strangers, it’s all I have.
I met a young lady in Honduras who was 15-years-old who had learned to write her name only a week before I met her. She was a tiny thing afraid to smile most days until she was able to spend enough time to trust you. She had two younger sisters—Olga and another sister whose name bore an uncanny resemblance to her own. We had a terrible time trying to correctly identify them, especially since neither of them knew how to write their names. Their own mother, having only a second grade education, couldn’t spell their names.
For a while, they both lived at the Eagle’s Nest, a home for abused and neglected young ladies that at the time was housing four other girls. One of the other girls, Stefani, used her prior schooling and phonetic knowledge to teach the oldest daughter how to spell her name: K-E-N-D-I.
Kendi had been sexually abused by her own father daily for years. She was afraid of men yet still craved their attention desperately. She had only finished the first grade since she lived in the most impoverished area of Tegus, in the rocky hills. Alvin arranged for her to live at the Eagle’s Nest where she was cared for by Tía Sally, a 70-year-old, no-nonsense lady from Michigan who didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and Tía Sara, a boisterous Nicaraguan woman who carried the burden of communicating with all of the girls of the house.
I had difficulty with Kendi and was brokenhearted because of it. She had a habit of hanging on everyone—constant skin touching skin, arms slung over shoulders in vice grips, and relentless clingy trailing. She never stood up for herself when Kevin and Bladi picked on her, and she refused to do anything by herself or to be around new people. Realistically, she was just getting used to life. Her face lit up by the magic of the stove. She was initially confused yet blessed by indoor plumbing, taking long, luxurious showers despite the frigid water. She was a leech—thirsty for knowledge, starving for attention, and recklessly in need of love.
The harshest reality of Kendi hit me when I realized my ghastly lack of empathy for her. The conviction of our kinship opened my eyes to myself as well as to her struggles. To be blunt, the things I saw in Kendi that bothered me were the very things I didn’t want to face in myself. Her tendency to latch onto anyone willing to give her some measure of love. Her unbridled craving for human contact—to know that she was worthy of such a thing. Her inability to stand up for herself. Kendi and I were sisters of insecurity struggles, and once my heart was opened to this fact, the bond between us was inescapable. How could I not grant grace to a younger, more troubled extension of my own soul? As the week trod onward, Kendi stole ever-widening places of my heart, and whether either of us was aware of it at the time, we grew together.
It wasn’t until Alvin retrieved Kendi’s papers to gain custody of her, to save her from her abusive parents, that we finally discovered her true, legal name: Quendy. Q-U-E-N-D-Y. To her, though, that will never be her name. Her name resides in that first step toward independence when she learned to write her own representation, when she began her journey toward physical and emotional freedom, when she was finally able to choose to depict herself—aside from her past.
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“But God wants me to find my satisfaction in wells in a famished land, not the river of a fat one.” – Jim Elliot
My roommates and I just bought a Brita water pitcher—the kind that purifies the spews of the Potomac that rush from our tap. I used to drink the water here simply because I was too cheap to buy water bottles. The pitcher is a vast improvement to our lives though. I find it keeps me company in those hot nights when I’ve slept with too many layers on and wake with flushed cheeks and a prickly throat. Any foul aftertaste is only an imagined, remaining memory imprint from water tasting past.
You can’t drink the water in Honduras. Well, not the tap water anyway. They tell us gringos not to cook or brush our teeth with it either, but after a while, you get tired of toting water from the main house to the bunk house. So you learn to live like a catracho, thrusting your minty covered bristles under the faucet’s cascade.
“Honduras means ‘deep waters,’ you know. When Columbus landed on the shores of Honduras he said, ‘Thanks be to God who got us safely across these deep waters’—Honduras,” Papí Alvin had said in the van one day as we jolted along the rocky terrain they use as roads in Comayaguela.
The rain in Honduras is a resident titan. In the rainy season, you can set your watch by the torrents, and slivers of water turn into muddy rivers in the roads within a matter of minutes. With our tin roofs overhead, conversation was drowned by din and shatter, and we talked with our eyes, sipping water at the kitchen table.
I was spoiled in Honduras. We drank purified water every day from neon-colored, plastic cups. The water was sweet and the temperature of the room. When I returned, I couldn’t weather the slosh from the tap with its fecal taste and metal smell. And still, it seems, no matter how it’s sifted or strained, packaged or flavored, the water here gives no hydrating life.
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“Oh gently lay your head upon My chest, and I will comfort you like a mother while you rest. The tide can change so fast, but I will stay the same through past, same in future, same today. I am constant. I am near. I am peace that shatters all your secret fears. I am holy. I am wise. I am the only one who knows your heart’s desires.” – Jill Phillips
We entered the dingy hospital room, armed with baby blankets and diapers, onezies and socks, ready to help the new mothers of Hospital Escuela. Being the cheapest hospital in the city, women who have nothing go there to have their babies and leave with nothing but a crying bundle. The women were worn and most often alone—with no male present to hold them or help them. In Honduras, culturally, babies are only the responsibility of the mother.
Women covered themselves with ragged sheets even as many were still bleeding. Their faces were flushed in the hot rooms as rare breezes blew through the open windows, and their stringy hair stuck to their faces. Bulging breasts emerged for hungry newborns, and our small group meandered through the room visiting each proud mother. Many were teenagers. We prayed with each, giving her things for her baby. We heard beautiful names and stroked thick, silky baby hair and held tiny, supple fingers.
And, in the middle of the room, we stumbled upon her—a middle-aged woman curled on her bed that was wet with tears. The heaviness of her sorrow permeated the room. Her name was María, and she had lost her baby. After carrying her fourth child for the full pregnancy, it was still-born. The emptiness of her arms in the midst of a room full of wailing newness left us in tears. The six of us women of various ages gathered around her, holding her hands, stroking her graying hair, and speaking words of comfort, although our collective tears spoke greater volumes. We prayed for her in Spanish and English and gave her the name of one of the missionaries she could call if she needed anything.
One of the women of our group, Jamie, had also lost a child many years before. As she cried with the woman and shared her story, there was a peace that fell—not a total removal of heartache, but the lightening of a shared burden. There is a certain unspeakable power in womanhood. It resides in the ability to be unified in brokenness, surrendering pride and sharing pain. On that day, it was a nurturing power that knew no language barriers.
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“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’” – Matthew 9:14
A plumber and carpenter by trade, a young Alvin Anderson squatted on a bucket on the precarious hillside with sandwiches in hand. It was his lunch break from the construction job in the hills of Tegucigalpa. The children of the neighborhood pushed closer to him, to the fringes of his presence. They had desperate eyes and underdeveloped bones, and they scampered ever closer like probing sparrows. Being the kind of man who treats every child as if she is his own, he invited them to his outstretched hands, to eat of his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This encounter, which grew in frequency, was the spark that started the feeding centers.
Now, years later, the giant pot of rice brims, and the stacks of tortillas sit neatly on the table, awaiting their homes in grimy hands and empty stomachs. The children close their long-lashed eyes and place their folded hands against their small faces as they are led in a group blessing for the food. They line up at the kitchen window with their plastic cups and makeshift bowls that siblings often share. Protective sisters make sure their baby brothers don’t spill their sausages while seated children roll their tortillas for eating. Hundreds of children are fed every Saturday at the two yellow feeding centers that tower high above the trickles of homes and jolting roads below. The centers serve as cafeterias and churches on Saturdays and trade schools and daycares on weekdays where preschool children are taught, and they, along with their sponsored older siblings, are fed.
Every Saturday, they hear a lesson from the Bible and sing songs, rejoicing for Jesus who is portrayed intimately to them through the love of Alvin Anderson. All he did was see a need and meet it, giving all that he had—all that God had provided. And through the tenderness of his heart and the obedience of his actions, he is changing the world by feeding and educating one Honduran child at a time. In a forgotten area, rampant with physical and sexual abuse as well as gang involvement, often the seed of love that Alvin and his helpers plant in each small child will be the only chance that child has for a hopeful future.
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“It’s the beauty of simplicity that brings me down to my knees . . . It’s the beauty of simplicity that fills me with eternity.” – Telecast
Hondurans, like many Latin Americans, love soccer. The whole country shuts down when the game is on and their team is playing. It seems that every Honduran—including the tiniest babies—sport blue and white jerseys to show their national pride. While I was in Honduras, the World Cup Semi-finals were taking place, and the United States and Honduras played each other a few times.
Watching the fútbol game isn’t just a family event; it is a neighborhood custom. At the Andersons’ house, we didn’t have a television that we could watch the game on, so we all piled into the car in the pouring rain to go to the house of Brenda and Geraldo. Brenda helped with cleaning, cooking, and laundry around our house while Geraldo was Alvin’s gruff and sloppy handyman. In the stuffy cement house with four rooms, concentrating on the small, grainy television screen, were Brenda and Geraldo and their five children, Nellie, Amy, Nelanie, Kevin, Bladimir, Roy, his brother Raúl, Anja and Torben (Danish volunteers), at least four neighbor kids, and me. Everyone was quiet and attentive when the game was on, and the sheer joy on the faces of the Hondurans when their team scored was enough to swallow the sun. Anja had brought two pear pies, a standard Danish dessert, to share with everyone. And as I helped her cut twenty-one neat slices so everyone would have a piece to eat out of the palm of his or her hand, I found myself overwhelmed by tears of joy, thinking, “This is how I want to spend the rest of my life.”
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"If you've ever known the love of God, you know it's nothing but reckless, and it's nothing but raging. Sometimes it hurts to be loved, and if it doesn't hurt it's probably not love, maybe infatuation. I think a lot of American people are infatuated with God, but we don't really love Him, and they don't really let Him love them. Being loved by God is one of the most painful things in the world; it's also the only thing that can bring us salvation, and it's like everything else that is really wonderful—there's a little bit of pain in it, little bit of hurt.” -- Rich Mullins
Murderers, thieves, and gang members smoothed their wrinkled skirts and wiped mascara-streaked tears from their faces. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back. Holding hands, these young women hung their heads with the silent sorrow of weary pasts. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back. They hugged each other, listening to the song that sang their hearts. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back.
From the second I stepped into their prayer and worship circle, I was one of them. A murderer, thief, and gang member. Although I wasn’t enclosed in a concrete and metal prison, I was captive in my own doubt of His love. I murdered His sacrifice by rebelliously trying to earn His love. I stole His gift of life with my own wasting of precious time. I joined the brutal ranks of the complacent. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back.
As I looked on the faces of the juvenile delinquent girls before me, I saw myself in their shining eyes, and words began to congregate in my mind. Lift up your head, My daughter. I told the girl next to me between my own quaking sobs. You are My princess, a child of the King. They were my sisters, broken yet beloved, and so in tune with my own struggle.
There is no greater pain than accepting the real love of Christ because you have to lose yourself. You can no longer hide behind fear and doubt when He makes Himself real to you. You can no longer convince yourself that you are unworthy or that your past sins are too much for Him to handle. Murderers, thieves, and gang members, suburbanites, politicians, and town drunks, are all children of the King. And when we fully discover this truth, as was inescapable that day at Sacred Heart and Rebirth Juvenile Detention Centers, there is no truly going back. No quiero volver atrás. I don’t want to go back.
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“You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.” – Matthew 5:4
Victoria, my Nicaraguan roommate for a few weeks, looked at the water in the floor with the wild eyes of a frightened mare. She tugged on my sleeve and began her speech of Nicaraguan English with a rhythm reminiscent of witches standing over cauldrons reciting spells. Her voice sounded thick like bubble gum, and her gold teeth flashed with every syllable. She was quite worried about the puddle in the floor of our bathroom hallway immediately outside of our showers. I reasoned that the grout was leaky, but she swore there was some other dire problem. Tucking her frizzled gray hair behind her ears, she began mopping after promptly calling for Roy.
Although I’d been there roughly a week or so, I hadn’t really noticed him until that moment—that frightful moment that filled me with a kind of inexplicable awe. He was hunched over our shower drain, peering intently, before he reached into the filmy water with bare fingers collecting the fibrous, soapy mass of scum and human hair from its stubborn position of clogging the drain.
In Martin 201, our humble college abode, we fight over who will clean out the shower drain. It is the most shirked chore of our household. Nikki flat-out refuses to look at it. I’ve cleaned the drain once, gagging every second of every tug, and Blair, brave soul that she is, confronts the collection of blonde, brown, and reddish strands more than the rest of us. What would ever possess a man to scour a drain for total strangers—shedding females at that? Yet he did every task he was asked to do, for little or no pay, with a brimming grin of contentment and a servant’s heart so apparent it was nearly touchable.
I don’t talk about Roy often. My face and voice betray me when I do.
Our friendship began with a mínimo—an unexpectedly shared lunch thrust into my stubborn hands—and flourished to include Spanish conversations of Teddy Roosevelt and motor bikes, church and children. A miraculous chipping away at an invisible language barrier. We visited as we did our laundry. Roy bit the side of his lip every time he scrubbed his shirts against the washboard of the outdoor pila, scattering fresh, white suds onto my sweatshirt with a sideways, playful glance. We walked to the pulpería, eating homemade coconut popsicles called paletas, and he introduced me to all of his friends in Villa Vieja, our neighborhood. He taught me how to wash dusty windows with old newspapers, and I patiently taught him English phrases, syllable by syllable. Amidst the afternoon bustle of Nicaraguan ladies in the matriarchal kitchen, I made him bologna sandwiches, and he shared his deep fried pastelitos. Perched on the wall around the cancha, I watched him play fútbol with the neighborhood muchachos, and he watched me scoop up children at the feeding centers.
We did all of his mandatos together—mudding a new cement wall, carrying bags of dirt, cleaning the van, and shopping for the household. We played with orphans together, haggled over groceries together, and did dishes together. He invited me everywhere he was ordered to go, and each time I gladly accompanied him, he thanked me for my companionship. Roy quietly protected me, and despite his lack of an imposing nature, no man challenged his silent guard. When we went our separate ways, doing our daily separate tasks, we found excitement in the opportunity to share the stories of the day with each other.
We sat for hours at the kitchen table talking against the dark, breeze-blown background of the boys’ play and Mamí’s music. I voiced my frustration over being objectified and disrespected by men, and he told me about his father leaving his family when he was seven-years-old. After he’d given blood to a sick, old abuelo, we prayed together outside the bunkhouse, petitioning for the old man’s health in each of our languages.
There was a stillness between us, a communication that mocked the frailties of language, that surpassed the tickling of words. I didn’t notice it all at once—it was a mystery that unfolded without my knowledge. We’d exchange a look—a gaze of brown and blue—that made me look again, knowing I had missed something, knowing I had only seen a hint of some hidden beauty. There were smiles of unspoken words and an overwhelming richness of sweet gratitude for another person that I had never known before. In our steady serving movement, in our mutually surrendered hearts, in our daring dreams, in the pain of leaving, in the anticipation of God’s mysterious future, there was a joy of finally finding home.
In essence, we shared it all, and when we said our quick goodbyes after a month of age-old friendship, his tears were contagious, and we shared those too.
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“Come up here; come up now, My beloved. My beloved. You said, ‘Come up here; come up now, My beloved. My beloved.’ I want to fly, oh Lord, like an eagle in the sky. I want to fly, oh Lord, through that doorway in the sky. Here I come, oh Lord. Here I come, oh Lord. . . . in the midst, in the midst of heartache, oh God. In the midst, in the midst of brokenness, oh Lord.” – Jason Upton
Papí Alvin has made many friends over the years, and he remembers every name, every year that he met every person, every story. He collects each little lamb with sweeping, open arms. One such friend is Julio Ruby, a man confined to a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy. Julio, a former singer and musician, lives in Tegus with his wife, Bessy, a fellow singer and musician. As Julio has gotten weaker over the years, it has become more and more difficult for Bessy to lift him out of bed to set him in his wheelchair. Because of this fact, Julio often had to stay in bed for days until Alvin knew of their trouble. Now, Alvin either travels every day to lift Julio out of bed, or he sends Roy to do so.
One day, when Alvin was out of town, Roy was headed to Julio’s, and since I hadn’t met them, I asked to go along. When we reached their cramped home perched along a lane of mangled concrete, I patiently waited with their yipping dogs as Roy lifted Julio out of bed and helped Bessy dress him. When he finally emerged into the poorly lit living room, we had a wonderful conversation in Spanish of his music and his past, singing and sharing God’s love with others. Roy, who is usually swamped with chores and errands, had never heard his music, so we both took the time to stay and listen to tape after tape of love songs, odes to Honduras, and worship music all in Bessy’s sweet soprano and Julio’s soulful crooning. We were both truly blessed. Before we left, they wanted to pray for me. This couple—who rarely see the light of day except through slit windows, who must rely on others for basic living, who spend their hours remembering the past before the toll of muscular dystrophy—took my hands and prayed for me. I have never been more humbled.
After that cherished encounter, I wanted to give a guitar to Bessy so that they could again make music together. My brother, Samuel, and a woman who is like a second mother to me, Cheryl, were slated to arrive toward the end of my time in Honduras, and Cheryl had a guitar she was willing to give away. When I told her of Bessy, she agreed with my ambition. The day after they arrived, Roy took us and another volunteer, Danielle, to their home.
We gave them the guitar and watched their faces melt with happiness. We were shocked when Bessy thrust the guitar into Cheryl’s hands and asked her to play. She began by playing the song “Come Up Here” by Jason Upton, which aptly talks of soaring to God to be in His presence. As she sang, we all began to feel the subtle mist of God’s presence, reflecting light in that dark, dirty place, cluttered with old pictures and old memories. Soon, one song wove into another until it was nothing more than careful strumming and soft, angelic voices singing their own hymns of worship to God. We didn’t all speak the same language, but we sang the same language of passion for His presence—a breathless hallelujah. My brother couldn’t speak. Roy held his face in his hands as tears streamed down his cheeks. The beauty of a song that wasn’t ours captured our hearts in the purest worship encounter I’ve ever been a part of.
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“And you say, ‘Be still, my love. Open up your heart. Let the light shine in. Don’t you understand, I already have a plan?’ I’m waiting for my real life to begin.” – Colin Hay
A member of a short-term mission team from South Carolina, my good friend, Beth, told me before she left Honduras, “Don’t be afraid to let yourself be loved.” I had only known her for a week, yet she seared to the very nucleus of my struggle. I had always prided myself on being an independent untouchable, a strong and self-sufficient woman, yet life had exposed my fragility, leading me to a magnificent inevitability. I fell in love in Honduras—with a dearest who knows every detail of every one of my heart’s desires, with a sweet writer who takes each of the loose strings of ink from my life story and ties together an all-encompassing mystery of benevolence. I used to say Honduras had my heart, but the truth is that I gave my heart to my Creator, to the One who already knew it best.
I didn’t want to leave Honduras. I cried every day for the last two weeks out of stubborn fear that I would lose all of the best things I had found in life. Yet I have learned that to truly walk in love and through love, moving in its fluidity, breathing in its amber sweetness, you have to surrender control. Romance is not predictable. The thrill resides in the wonder and breathless anticipation of endless possibilities driven by divine love.
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“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” – Isaiah 6:8
WOOOW! Longest post in the world! Just got here and havn't read it yet lol. Good idea, though. :P
ReplyDeleteYou are an amazing writer. I can't wait to read more.
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