things you experience on a Bolivian public hospital bench [the story of prudence and mariela – part two]

This is part two of this particular story. To read part one, click here.

Hilariously, after hearing Prudence tell their life stories, all I could think to do was ask how I could help – even though she’d already told me all of those things at the beginning of our conversation. (People’s stories always seem to soften our hardened hearts by highlighting our shared humanity). She laughed, probably remembering how the conversation began as well, and listed a few things like a crib or clothes or a car if there were some way for me to get them.
 
Observing my face painted with the helpless desire to be somehow helpful, Prudence laughed again and spoke one of the most religious things I’ve ever heard in the least religious way I’ve ever heard.
 

Just at that moment, my eyes welling and brain racing with some way to respond to such profound truth, Mariela let out a scream for her mother and began wailing. Prudence stopped talking, full attention then on her unofficially adopted daughter to whom she bears no real responsibility, and wrapped her arms tightly around the crying toddler whose body shook with her bawls. She began whispering softly into Mariela’s ears like only a mother can, but the crying wouldn’t stop. After much rocking, rubbing and cooing, the only solution Prudence could find was to play music from her antiquated LG phone and let the buttons light up to distract Mariela.
 
As the song began to play, it was familiar to me, a slow worship song that I knew somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain. My mind wafted to last summer in Spain and I heard the voice of Martín, my Argentinean older brother, singing in the soft voice whose sweetness moves me to tears upon a single memory. My mind traveled again to Ecuador, month one of the Race, and I heard the smiley voice of Efrén, our beloved pastor at La Luz Carapungo, leading worship on our last Sunday morning and singing the same song.
 
The lyrics go like this, and it’d be cool if you played the YouTube video at the bottom to hear the song as you continue reading:

 
Between Mariela’s quieting sobs I took in the lyrics, unsure that I’d ever really listened before, and gently caressed her soft, tiny foot as I watched Prudence’s arms envelope an adopted child in a birth mother’s embrace. Not noticing the thirty other people in the room, the three of us sat on the bench together while the song played, and as my tears rolled down my cheeks I noticed that Prudence used her hands to wipe away Mariela’s tears rather than to dry the streams on her cheeks that ran together to form a single tear dangling from the tip of her own nose, a single droplet that seemed to contain so many emotions, experiences, troubles and heartaches that I could never begin to comprehend; a tear that hung on for dear life as the crier had done for so many years.

 
Never in my life have I sat so close to such a selfless love.
 
Not thinking it possible that I could cry any harder without making offensive noises, I tried to hold it together for Prudence as best I could. I rubbed Mariela’s leg and put my hand on Prudence’s back, the only consolation I could think of for the woman who has been dealt life’s hardest hand and still managed a Full House of love.
 
And in those minutes, however many they were, as I observed dear Prudence whisper things like
 

I couldn’t help but see myself in the arms of Love Itself, broken and crying and afraid of being left alone but scooped up into a Parent’s all-encompassing arms, arms that envelope every inch of me and belong to a whisper that has promised to never leave, to always be there holding me, to wipe away my tears instead of His own, to adopt me as His own child even though He owes me nothing and has no responsibility to me, not thinking of me as a burden but instead a blessing, arms that have sacrificed everything just to make sure I’m never abandoned.
 
As the song came to an end, my sobs did not.
 
I didn’t stop crying because I knew deep in my bones and with every fiber of my being and with every tear that rolled down my cheeks that in that moment,
Mariela had not been the only one being held and loved in Someone’s arms.
 
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