“As Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud,
‘Have mercy on us, Son of David.’
When He entered the house, the blind men came to Him, and Jesus said to them,
‘Do you believe that I am able to do this?’
They said to him, ‘Yes, Lord.’
Then He touched their eyes, saying, ‘According to your faith be it done to you.’
And their eyes were opened.”
-Matthew 9:27-29
—
A man with white hair and worn denim jeans approaches us as we wait for our bus. It’s around noon, the sun is shining down hot and bright, and we’ve gathered in a circle. I’m standing near the back, watching the man with white hair interact with my friends Aly and Maddie. He’s asking them who we are and why we are here. He says that he’s known a group before us who had been able to help his wife.
He’s asked us if we could come to his house today, right now, to pray for his wife.
Aly turns back and looks at the rest of us, “There’s somebody at his house who needs prayer. Are you guys okay with stopping?”
“Yes. Let’s do it.”
This is what it means to live interruptible.
I’m immediately flooded with stories from the gospels- times when the Son of God, the Son of David, would pass through a town and he would be interrupted. He would be interrupted because he had a reputation of being a healer, He had an aura of being their answer, their Messiah. The group who this man had known before us had left a reputation of Jesus behind, one that we were now being asked to meet.
We follow him to his house, which turns out to be only about 15 feet down from where we had originally been standing on the street. His house is connected to a tortilla shop we had stood in front of many times before, but had never really seen until today. The shop is a front room that opens to the street. There’s a stove on the right side, a stove that fills most of their house with smoke and chars the ceiling and walls.
We pass through the dimly lit shop- coming into a second room, we have entered the house of the man with white hair. There’s a table in the corner, a twin sized bed against one wall, and a queen sized bed pushed against a third wall. His wife sits on the edge of the queen sized bed. She looks worn but beautiful, wearing a stained apron and gray hair pinned up close to her head. She looked at us kindly and smiles, and her husband who had led us to her began setting out seats for us to stay awhile. His wife starts digging through a backpack by her bed. She finds what she’s looking for- it’s a small polaroid picture of the last people who had visited her. It was a group of Gap Year Racers who had been in Guatemala the month before us, who had stopped at this same bus stop, who had left the reputation of an interruptible Jesus behind. We passed around the picture of her with the last World Race Team. Our hearts felt giddy and excited to be here.
We started getting to know them. The man who had approached us on the street is named Guadalupe David, and his wife is Maria Elena. They have been together for 52 years. It turns out, he also initially met her at a bus stop- I guess bus stops are places buzzing with potential connection and possibility. We learned more about the reason we were there: Maria Elena has four ulcers on her right calf, and a stroke had caused her left hip to be in lots of pain, as well as experience the strain of overcompensation due to the ulcers on her other leg. The team who had visited her before us would often pray for her, and had even supplied her with medication that had really helped her ulcers begin to heal.
We had also had noticed that Guadalupe walks with a limp. We ask him what had happened, and he responds by telling us the truck he used to drive in Antigua had caused his knee to vibrate so constantly that he now he is left with perpetual pain and a strong limp. All of us are sitting in our chairs with this beautiful elderly couple, and we all look at each other in a way that communicates, “we are going to war for this couple to have the best life that God has for them.” That means praying- praying with authority, praying more than once, praying with confidence that God is in this space and He wants to bring healing. Praying because it is like God to restore, and to restore to health.
We start by laying hands on Guadalupe. We pray for him, and the pain lessens. We pray again. We pray a third time. One of us asks him to stand, and to walk. He does, and when he moves, there is no more limp. There is no more pain. He smiles big and he laughs, picking up some speed. We ask if he has any more pain anywhere else, and he holds his stomach. We lay hands on him again, and his stomach is relieved from what had plagued it with pain before.
We now want to pray for Maria Elena. We move our circle over to her place on the bed, and we lay hands on her. Guadalupe is praying with us. Her pain lessens, but it does not go away. We pray for healing a few more times. The pain has not gone down. She looks around to us, and she says, “I am confident in the Lord’s love for me. I am thankful for the healing He has given. I am thankful for the help He has sent me.”
In our hearts, we know she has spoken out of truth. She is secure in love.
My squad leader who’s there with us, Aly, has a raging headache. Getting on the first bus here, she had hit her head- hard. It had caused her to have a throbbing headache and severe neck pain. God asks her to do something. He asks her to tell Maria. Aly obeys, telling Maria about the accident and her head pain, and she proceeds to ask Maria to lay hands on her and pray for her. With complete confidence authority, Maria agrees. Aly sits down next to her, and we all begin to pray. Maria is rapidly speaking in Spanish, her hands on Aly’s neck. At the end of the prayer, Aly looks up. She smiles softly. Her headache is gone, completely.
Maria Elena has hands that heal.
Guadalupe tells us that he no longer goes to church because he does not want to go without his wife, who cannot walk there because of the pain in her legs. It’s a Friday, and we decide that on Sunday, we are coming back.
“You may not be able to go to church. But today, the church has come to you.”
I tell Guadalupe that he reminds me of the people of great faith in the gospels, who had approached Jesus with confidence that He was the Son of God. Guadalupe had confidence not because of us, but because he recognized God in us. We tell them that we believe there will be a day that they walk around the neighborhood together, hand in hand, telling their neighbors of the God who heals. The God who restores.
At church on Sunday, sitting in our circle of chairs at their house, we sing worship songs in Spanish and recite different scriptures. Guadalupe and Maria repeat the scriptures back to us. This is how they learn verses, because neither of them can read nor write. Guadeloupe had to stop going to school when he was really young, because his parents could no longer afford it. Maria has a similar story. Today, Maria and Guadeloupe have twenty grandchildren. Evelyn, their 10 year old granddaughter, comes home every day with her book bag full of notes on what she’s been learning. She sits down at the table, gets out 5 or 6 colored notebooks of all her different classes, and proudly shows off and works on what she’s been doing at school. Even though Guadalupe and Maria did not go to school, they have worked hard to prepare the way for their children and grandchildren to have more opportunities for their lives.
The next time we visited them, we got to see that Maria really likes to make jokes. We had brought her and her family scones, and at first she refused to eat any if weren’t also having some. We weren’t budging either. Finally she gave in, and with a smile on her face she pretended to offer each of us a piece of her scone, and then she would swiftly put the piece in her own mouth instead. This is the same day the she told us to no longer call her Maria- we now call her Abuela.
Every day that we get to our bus stop, we peek our heads into the tortilla shop to check if our Grandma’s home, and we kiss her on the cheek when she comes over to say hello. She waits with us and watches for a bus, and she’ll say “no!” when the wrong bus stops to try pick us up.
At the end of our day of ministry, when we’re tired and a little famished from walking in our village or playing with children at the soccer field, we get off at Grandma’s bus stop and we run over to see if Grandpa’s bread is ready and warm. Grandpa makes sweet breads, french breads, and cookies. His bread making room is the back of his house- there’s big wooden table where he kneads the dough, a giant oven made from brick and clay, and wooden shelves for the end product. The fresh bread is waiting in the front of the shop in a big woven basket under a pretty tablecloth to be sorted through and sent on its way. We pick out which warm comforting treats we want that day, and Abuela bags them for us. There’s always a battle between us trying to pay, and her wanting the bread to be a gift. Sometimes we just have to give in because her kindness is relentlessly stubborn and the bus pulls up too quickly, and sometimes we sneak some of our quetzals under the pan or basket before she can chase us away.
I giddily told my team one day that before leaving for the race, I had expressed to my friend Jess that I just had a sense in Guatemala I was going to meet an elderly woman and she was going to become my grandmother. When we initially met Maria, I had forgotten every saying it. And then by the third time we visited her, when she said to us, “don’t call me Maria Elena, call me Abuela.” Sitting there on a wooden stool, surrounded by my sisters, she invited us into her family with the privilege and honor of calling her what her own grandchildren do.
It’s really incredible to live led by the Spirit of God. He continually surprises me with the chase of His Beloved simultaneously being His chase for my own heart. I didn’t know during the summer that the inkling of having a Guatemalan Grandmother was actually a divine appointment to cross-stitch a family of Gringa Grandchildren to their Central American Abuelos. God is about unity, and family, and intentionality.
Because of this relationship, I am encouraged to live interruptible. I am reminded that divine encounters bless each individual involved. I am newly fascinated with the idea of bus stops having an energy of possibility and potential. It is a joy to be a Child of God, to know that every day I live the gospel the favor of God establishes my steps.
Thank you for reading.
Please keep my Abuela and Abuelo in your prayers!
