I’m cutting onions with Caleb, both of us streaming tears down our faces from their bitter fumes, trying to ignore it and keep on with our conversation about books. Finished, we slam knives down and bolt to the sink, rinsing, drying, looking, laughing.
“GUYS!” Daiva shouts, bursting into the kitchen where we are preparing the largest pot of soup I’ve ever made for the homeless of Pitesti.
“This is amazing! That Lord has such plans for today!” She launches into one of her, as we call them ‘heart melting praise attacks’ where, in a thanksgiving/prayer style, she tells us about the gypsy street people she, Rashidat, and our host, Cristi, just invited over for soup.
She tells us they met the leader of the group, a man, a pimp, who prostitutes out the women who live with him, who prostitutes out his own wife. Nearly all of them are addicted to drugs.
I nod, and turn to stir the soup. A strange thing to live a lifestyle where dinner with pimps, prostitutes, and addicts has become normal.
A couple hours later, they arrive, filling our church-home, returning the building-body to its intended purpose of open doors for the lost and destitute.
I see her when I come up from the basement carrying chairs. She has a round little face, big brown eyes, and a mess of long brown curls. Her little lips are turned down into a toddler’s scowl and I know my mission today; to make her smile.
Her name is Alexia. She is four years old. She broke my heart.
It was a bit of cat and mouse at first. I waved across the table to her, she hid her face in her mom’s side. I brought her a sandwich that she accepted with a blank look. She sat down and I took the empty chair next to her, upon which she immediately jumped up and walked away.
Eventually, we found ourselves in the rock pile in front of the church. I sat on the stoop as she brought me rocks. We stacked them, lined them into shapes, counted them in Romanian, and played a game of throwing them into a cup.
Yeah, she smiled and she laughed once the ice thawed. Purity and innocence rolled off the beautiful child, hitting me like a hurricane, filling me with deep compassion, but leaving me wrecked in ways I haven’t been before.
The worst of it hit, ironically, during the church service Cristi hosted. I found myself sitting next to the leader Daiva was telling us about.
In a complete change from my heart in Thailand, I sat next to this man—middle aged, missing his front teeth, beer belly hanging out, balding— and saw not a pimp, not an exploiter, not an enemy, but a man. Nothing more. A man.
And once I realized that’s all he is—man—hopelessness descended in full force. People. That’s all we are. And, oh, how we suffer.
And Alexia. Innocence. She deserves more. She deserves more. She deserves more. More than living on the streets, than drug addicted parents, than the nest of lice in her hair, than the racism she’ll experience being born gypsy, than the life she’s been place into not of her own actions but because of her birth.
I feel hopelessness pull a lot—a lot— on the Race, but here, month nine, here, in an entire town depressed, here sitting in church with the homeless, I could not fight.
Why God has called me, the one who even on her best days feels like she’s groping and pulling and fighting for hope in the pitch black, to stare hopelessness in the face every single day for nine months is beyond me.
And I know. I know in my head it’s about trust and faith and love. I know. I have faith, I have faith, I have faith, I have faith that I am a mustard seed, but I also have a human heart bent toward forgetfulness and folly, unable to contain the multitudes of suffering humans I’ve met on this journey.
So I watch as, after service, Alexia walks away with the group of street people back to the city center where they live. She turns around and waves to me before they got too far off.
I went inside and I wept, openly, like a child. The teams get it and they loved me, but I hated being the only one crying. I wanted to yell, “Don’t you understand? Don’t you see? Can’t you feel it?”
I didn’t. I tried, instead, to explain between sobs what I felt. I kept saying “it’s too much. Nine months, it’s too much.”
Few words of comfort were offered and I love them all the more for that.
I cried most of the afternoon, put headphones in, and fell asleep once the sun went down. When I woke up the next morning, early, and stood in the kitchen over brewing coffee, I asked myself if it really was too much.
Nano interrupted my thoughts with a sunny smile and a bright “good morning, Kay!” The nickname has slowly seeped into M-Squads vocabulary and makes me feel seen and loved beyond explanation.
We chatted and he, in a way only Nano can, said something so simple yet so profound, “you know, Christ in you sows hope wherever you go. Even when you can’t see it. And He’s doing that in you. One day, you yourself is going to be a whole field of hope.”
A field of hope. Me? Someday…maybe? Today I feel more like a patch of cold dirt.
I wrote a poem recently, finished the morning I met Alexia, and there’s one stanza that’s ministered to me since that day;
//
“Head, still. Heart, still… I Trust. There will be time.
For now, ‘let go’ says He, ‘let go’
And I fall, eyes wide open.
Ah, here. Grace.
The mustard seed sprouts.”
//
It’s not too much, Jesus, if you give me your heart. It’s not too much, God, if I can only have your eyes. Change this dirt, make the tears rains to feed the seed. Yes, a field of hope.
