Sweet Little Truths

He didn’t want to play with any of the other students before our first class at KJ Generation began, now nearly a month ago.
 
I remember rattling off a list of games for us to play together – “Badminton? Ping pong? No?! What about a puzzle? It’ll be fuuuun, I promise!” – before I saw the burns on the right side of his face, stretching from his scalp to his right arm and torso. Lee Keat had an uneasy smile, politely answering my barrage of over-zealous questions with a slight shake of his head. He, along with his little brother Lee Kang, sat down at the table, deciding to wait quietly for class to start instead. 
 
For the two weeks that followed our first meeting, he would smile politely at me when he entered and then sit down — a drastically different picture from the other kids who would race into class, ready to battle each other with paper swords and excitedly jump on us for piggyback rides around the room.
 
I didn’t get to interact with him directly until our last week, when my teammate Tyler and I taught his brother and him a private English lesson. Still, he barely spoke. Sometimes I’d get a smile out of him, other times a blank stare; but his patience with himself and others displayed a gentleness and goodness that I couldn’t help but admire.
 
Our last night in Gua Musang, I taught a small class, which included Lee Keat again. I struggled to capture the children’s attention for the full two hours, and ultimately decided to take them outside to help paint a mural our team was working on. Lee Keat did as he was told, quietly painting a section without going outside the lines, and then patiently waited for further instructions. As the other kids started to paint their own hands and arms and, to my chagrin, decided to fingerpaint random sections of the wall, I found myself losing sight of my purpose here. Instead of showing them grace and patience and love, I cared more about the end product of our mural, slipping out a few “Oh no!”s when paint would drip and splatter where it wasn’t supposed to. I ended the class feeling like I had missed an opportunity to show Christ’s love to these kids. Frustrated, I thought: “Jesus, what’s wrong with me that I am so uptight about our mural that I can’t simply laugh it off when kids are just being kids?!”
 
It was to my surprise the next day, when I was outside finishing up our mural, that Lee Keat, Lee Kang, and their father stopped by the center and wandered over to me, placing a box of Chinese cakes in my hands. With big, excited smiles on their faces, they said in unison, “Thank you teacher!” and nervously giggled at each other as I began to cry. I knew this cake was for my entire team, not just me, but the fact that God orchestrated events so that I could receive it on behalf of my team and see Lee Keat smile was wonderfully significant to me. Their small gift showed me that my striving to be the “perfect missionary” (whatever that means) is completely futile. This is God’s work, not my own, and sometimes we have no idea how God uses even our moments of weakness to impact others.

Later that night, Josephine, our contact, told me that she and Kumar both received words from God that my life ministry would be to heal children and bring love into the deepest wounds in their hearts.
 
Again, I cried.
 
These words spoke truth directly into a long-time insecurity. As the youngest child in my family, I never thought I had that quality that kids enjoyed, finding that I connected with older people much better. But God reminded me, through Lee Keat’s gift and Josephine and Kumar’s words, that He does not call the equipped, He equips the called. Whether or not working with children is a natural strength of mine is not important. This battle I think I am fighting is actually His, and He has already declared victory. What a beautiful thing that is!