The cheerful melody of children’s laughter beckoned me from my sleep this morning. Pushing aside the mosquito net that draped around my bed like a princess canopy, I stumbled my way across the cold tile to the kitchen, the source of the laughter. There I found the African host women already hard at work making chapati with the help of their tiny sous-chefs.
As I plopped down beside them, I gathered little Nasra in my arms squeezing her chunky little body tight against my own. When we first got here it took a while for her to warm up to me. It seems she is picky with her friends, plus, I think my white skin blinded her unaccustomed eyes. But after a few hours of hard work- charming her with ridiculous faces and absurd tricks, I had finally won her over. Now, three days later, we are dear friends.
The women were much easier to befriend. The first day Amanda, Amber and I sat on the kitchen floor for hours with a beginner Swahili pamphlet making pathetic attempts to create sentences they’d understand. Tears of laughter rolled down their cheeks as they mimicked us and then repeated “Jina lako nani” for the tenth time.
Come to find out the women had actually known a bit of English, and though they appreciated our attempts at Swahili, little by little we learned about their stories, families, and hopes for the future through broken English. Each of them is delightful and absolutely stunning.
As I sat holding Nasra, I watched Marta’s skilled hands move in a kind of artistic dance rolling chapati dough on a wheel into a perfect tortilla shape while turning and flipping another one on an oiled iron pan. She clearly didn’t need assistance, but I asked if I could help her roll the dough. Delighted she held out the rolling pin and patiently taught me the sweeping wrist motion. My chapati circles took five times as long to finish, were oddly shaped and unevenly proportioned, but Marta slapped them on the iron pan and joyfully clapped her flour-covered hands in applause.
I thought loving people meant giving something to them, but I’m realizing it often means just being with them.
That’s the way that God loved us. He didn’t wrap salvation up in a pretty gift box and drop it down from Heaven for us to open. Instead he came down to be with us. He stepped into our human culture- dressing like us, eating like us, talking like us, but mostly just being with us. He left his kingdom, beautiful as it was, because that’s what love does. Love befriends. Love embraces, touches, and engages. Love is present. That’s the kind of love he modeled to humanity and the kind of love that he offers us individually everyday. He is present in our lives- living in us and doing life with us.
He doesn’t want anything from us except to love Him back with the same kind of engaged love. When we offer to help Him, we don’t offer because He needs our assistance. We offer because want to be where He is, involved in what He is doing. It’s because we love Him. And nothing brings Him more joy than letting us in on His plans and endeavors and then patiently teaching us how. It doesn’t bother Him in the slightest if our excecution of the task is messy and uneven. All He wants is for us to be together, it’s what He had in mind for us since the beginning.
