Her throaty chuckle was instantly endearing as she tore into the room, animated by the excitement of meeting her new American houseguests. She has a fast, gap-toothed smile, and before I could blink she was doing a handstand with pointed toes in the air. Knowing my own headstand would produce a disastrous fall, I compromised by simply placing the top of my head on the mat with an upside down smile. She broke out into a fit of contagious laughter, letting her feet hit the floor with an audible thud. I couldn’t be certain, but I guessed I had just made a fast friend of little Lydia. Before I knew it, she threw her skinny arms around my neck in a forceful hug that nearly sent me to the ground. Yes, we were definitely friends.
At the point of my first meeting with Lydia, we had only been in Mama Margarita’s Home for Girls in Manaus for about an hour and we were completely smitten. It was a gold mine ministry contact and host as it housed 20 at risk young girls and taught hundreds more. Not only are they taught classes, they are taught theatre, dance, sports, are given three meals a day and even provided showers. It is an oasis in a dark, Amazonian desert for these girls who would otherwise be destined to repeat the deadly cycle of abuse, neglect, and trafficking to which they were so cruelly exposed. I was in awe of God’s handiwork and the people who tirelessly worked to make this compound a home. Instead of the darkness I assumed I’d feel, I was radiant with infectious joy.
Unfortunately, although my first encounter with Lydia was charmed, I was quickly warned about her violent and emotional behavioral patterns. At only 6 years old, she had been exposed to unthinkable horrors and was now fatherless and abandoned by a mother who lived on the streets. Her life was one marred with aggression, drugs, neglect, and abandonment. Her three months in the home had been ones of discouraging and fruitless rehabilitation. She clung to authority figures and spiraled into fits when she wasn’t given her way. Our fast friendship became suffocating as quickly as it began.
As it had become quickly apparent, it wasn’t easy work for those who manned the trenches. In fact, I could easily fathom how one would equally love their work here and be devastatingly heartbroken by it as well. While the girls were shown constant love, dedication, care, and discipline, they clearly battled against the lies and conditioning that had been their first and ruthless teacher. The young girls wore layers of makeup, shrouding beautiful but insecure faces. They showered us with compliments and gifts that while generous, had a sad aftertaste of desperation to win affection. It was clear from my interactions with those little girls, Lydia among them, that they were accustomed to battling to be worthy of love. My heart cried out to them, seeking to break through both language barrier and fortress of brokenness saying, “Little girls, don’t you know the love you’re looking for is already yours?”
My hunch is, God feels very similarly about us more often than we might think. He often watches us strive in our day to day lives and in our prayers to gain a love that we’ve never lived a moment without. As our love for ourselves waxes and wanes along with our successes, our projection of God’s love for us changes too. We fight in our days to earn scraps that have fallen from the table when we’ve been called honorary guests at the grand feast of life. When He looks at our spiritual makeup and desperate gifts of time and service, He probably feels the same sadness that I felt looking at those beautiful little broken-hearted girls.
Now I am certainly not a “I can do nothing and go to heaven” kind of person. I believe firmly that faith without works is indeed dead and I know the King of Heaven will have no part in what is not fully alive. But I am learning that my works of love and service for Him should be reflections of a love that I cannot and should not contain. An absence of works on my part will not and could not result in a lack of God’s love. He is the unchanging one, not me. The only thing changing is my dedication to pursuing Him from the love I’ve already received. He doesn’t tire of loving me, I tire of giving His love back or receiving it at all.
With Lydia, I consciously stopped trying to meet her every need. I was exhausted, trying to provide her a love that only the Father can give. Though it crushed me at times, I realized her emotional issues with attachment and subsequent tantrums were a result of her need to control the love others expressed to her which was just feeding the lie that she needed to fight tooth and nail for it. For her sake, I had to let her down and tell her no, because that was the best way I could show her that I loved her whether I was holding her or not. Reflecting on my own life, God has given me the same hard lessons from time to time. He’s shown me by His silence or by my unanswered prayers that He can only tell me to trust His love so many times before I just have to accept it for what it has always been and move forward. I needed to stop striving for His love and start living from it. I think we all learn this lesson many times over before the end.
Leaving Mama Margarita’s Home, I can’t bring Lydia in my backpack. However, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop loving her. It just means that the only constant she can rely on in her life is God’s affection for her. I’m confident that one day she’ll see that He’s more than enough—and so is she. Until then, she’ll be receiving love from her amazing volunteer teachers who sit patiently with her as she battles with the lies in her life. It’ll likely be a long road of sorting through fact from fiction, friend from enemy, and everything in between. But the presence of Mama’s Margarita’s Home is one sign of many that God hasn’t given up on the lost yet, and won’t likely anytime soon.
