"Everybody, everybody wants to love. Everybody, everybody wants to be loved"
-Ingrid Michaelson
The chorus of this songs is a mind numbingly simple tune that is surely enough to make any good lyricist crazy… but the words hold a telling truth
When sung from the mouths of tattered hearts the lyrics are heard much louder than the simple melody that is familiar to us.
I had the privilege of spending a few days a week in Malaysia with a group of women who loved this song. They would come from the place that they called home to sit and chat, eat, sing, make jewelry, and learn about God. But their home was no home at all. We could see it on our daily commute from the monorail. Just as the train would wrap around the bend we would catch a quick glance at the bridge they lived under and liked to call "Hotel Budget". These women were prostitutes and lived under this bridge with a few hundred other people.
One of the women from the center was five months pregnant at the time and was considered to have a high risk pregnancy. She had lost two babies before and was now in danger of losing a third.
Every time I would see her I would say "Lucy, apa kabar baby Ricky Martin?" She would laugh and say, "Yeah! Baby Ricky Martin gooood" put her hand to her stomach and sing "you're way too beautiful girl…"
I didn't have the heart to tell her that the song was actually Sean Kingston…
Another girl was about 24, my height and weighed about 80lbs. She was HIV positive and not doing well. Her story is not mine to share, but I can tell you that she grew up in a way that no child should ever, ever grow up.
We knew that she was sick from her physical appearance, but her joy and love seemed to tell us otherwise. She always hugged tightly and kissed me on both cheeks when she saw me. She was the one that really loved that song. It broke me to see the state that she was in, but I loved to hear her sing.
She walked up to me one day and measured my waist with her hands and then moved them to her own. Then she stood next to me and asked one of the other girls in Bahasa if we were the same size. They just shook their heads and grabbed her around the waist to show her that she was much smaller.
Her condition worsened the longer we were there. The last day that we saw her she was sitting at the table making a bead necklace and kept pressing her hand against her chest. When I asked her what was wrong she just told me that it hurt. She was talking about her heart.
In that moment I tried with everything in me to come up with some way that I could help her.
I wanted to call for an ambulance.
I wanted her to go to the hospital.
I wanted to just yell out to anyone that could hear me "don't you see that she's dying?!"
But what would that have done?
Everyone knew.
She knew.
I couldn't let myself be okay with believing there was nothing I could do. I'm a fixer. I saw something broken and I needed to fix it.
I sat against the wall and just watched her. I tried to come up with some sort of plan that I could convince everyone else of, but my mind was a complete blank. I felt helpless. There was literally nothing that I could do to save this girl.
As much as I wanted to cry I knew that I couldn't. For her sake.
In that moment God was telling me to just stop.
He told me that it was okay. It was okay that she was sick. It was okay that there was nothing that I do. It was okay that I wanted to cry. It was okay that I didn't understand.
She's not mine to take care of. She is His.
I fought hard to hold on to her. I didn't want to give up. My mind chased after ideas that quickly exhausted me because no matter what I came up with there was no solution that I could manage. I had to give up. I had to surrender her from my ideas that made me think I could save her.
God spoke to me through the tears that I had to hold back.
He spoke to me in my moment of panic and frustration.
He told me that I didn't need to hold her so tightly because He was.
He promised me that He was looking after her and that He wouldn't leave
He told me that right now the only thing that I needed to do was to love her.
And I did. I loved those girl with everything I had in me.
