“You know your on the race when all you want for your birthday is a shower.”
I was bummed about my birthday the week prior and didn’t really want to celebrate it; I missed my family and friends that I would’ve brought 22 in with back at home. I missed my friend’s spaghetti and her homemade frosting, and my brothers and sister, and I really just wanted to hug my mom on my birthday. I woke up and was bummed that we weren’t able to get the day off to go to the island and go swimming, but rather were headed back out to ministry. Once we were all in the back of the truck, we turned a different way on the boulvard and based off our memorized routes on how to get to the universities, we were not going to them that day. We pulled into a school and saw a sea of kids staring as six Americans climbed out of the truck. Without pastor telling us you could see that this wasn’t a “typical” school. I saw a little boy who had down syndrome sitting in a small circle, I saw another group of kids in another using sign language. That days ministry was working at a school for the disabled, and my heart melted.
We were showed the “playground” for the school which was just a slab of concrete that could possibly pass for a basketball court if there were lines painted and baskets, and as we stood there was a wave of kids coming towards us. Most of the kids were deaf and mute, and as they inspected us and saw our tattoos and piercings you could see them talking about us and just laughing and smiling. We each had a circle of kids around us when I saw her, she was a little girl no older than 7 maybe but she was sitting by herself so I went to sit next to her. I told her my name and tried to get her to talk to me when three girls who weren’t far off came over and signaled that she couldn’t hear or talk. O shoot, how do I do this? So I motioned to give me her hands and we simply played hand games and I hugged her.
But we weren’t just there to play with the kids but our actual job for the day was to sweep out their classrooms, eight in total, and mop them to get them ready to paint by a team from a sister church in South Africa who LIfeChurch was also hosting for that week. That probably sounds like no big deal, but these classrooms were so dirty, and we were locked in more for the purpose so that the kids wouldn’t come in, so it was a lot not to take in but rather to inhale. As I was sweeping I was thinking about how does one show God’s love when they weren’t able to verbally speak it. I could always rely on words to speak of it, but when my voice is taken away, do my actions convey the love of Christ in me? By the time the South African’s arrived we were filthy and after lunch we started to paint crazy bright colors in each room and hallways.
As we returned to Adelson and Vina’s house for cake, I wasn’t so much bummed as I was processing the day when Eric came and talked to me outside. He told me that this was a great birthday to give up so that those kids wouldn’t have to spend theirs in a place where there was no color or light. To not think about the missed opportunities that we could’ve done but rather to think about what we had done and the people that it would impact either in a small way or big. Yeah, it wasn’t what I thought my 22nd birthday would be, but it was good still.
-And yes I did sing “22” by T.Swift, just with South Africans and Americans as we were painting classrooms for the disabled in Maputo, Mozambique.
