The language barrier is one thing that I was warned about before coming on the World Race. People who had traveled before told me how hard it was going to be to communicate with people who have absolutely no idea what you are saying. How are you supposed to spread the Gospel message if communication is scarce, let alone get people to comprehend how much God loves them?
The whole Race up to this point has led me to one of the realizations that I experienced this month. That God has called me to love – to love myself and to love others regardless of what is going on around me. Even if I don’t speak the same language as the little boy sitting next to me, I am still called to love him. And that is what happened this month.
On the night we arrived in Mozambique, our host’s son, Popino looked up at me with the most precious brown eyes and began to tell me some elaborate story. He kept going on and on about things, while I simply had no idea what in the world he was saying. I shook my head and said, “Yep, that’s exactly right.” Then, he pulled my face close to him and whispered in my ear something along the lines of, “Papa no finka no.” What?!?! I know that he speaks Portuguese, which is kind of close to Spanish, but that does not sound like anything I’ve ever heard before. His story eventually ended, and he walked away satisfied about the things he just told me. This is the kind of interaction that became the basis of our relationship.
Popino is 8-years-old, but because he got malaria twice within his first year of life, he is a little developmentally delayed which makes him seem younger than he actually is. Angie, his mother and our host, took care of him when he was an infant because his biological mother could not. He grew up as one of Angie’s children, and she has been in the process of adoption for a few years now. It was very humbling one day to get to talk to Angie about his biological mother and to see for my own eyes the devastation that Popino was saved from. Because he is not like the other children his age, he requires a different sort of attention in order to thrive that would not have been given to him otherwise. Only God knows where he would be if Angie would not have responded to the call on her life to love like Christ loves and to give Popino a chance at a fruitful life.
Over the course of the month, this little boy captured my heart piece by piece. From the moment that he whispered in my ear some unknown phrase (which was his favorite thing to say), I knew that, among other reasons, God had placed me at this ministry to love on His child. All of his mannerisms and phrases that seemed so foreign at the beginning of the month were exactly what I loved about him at the end of the month. He would sit with us while we did our ministry work, hang out with us during our free time, and snuggle with us when he got tired. Although I only got to spend a few weeks with Popino, I will forever remember his laugh, his playfulness, his stories that I could not understand, and the joy that it brought my heart to get to share with him the love of Jesus. I hope that one day the Lord will bring me back to this little boy that will always hold a piece of my heart.
Even if it’s something other than language differences, we all have our own reasons for passivity and inactivity. What if, instead of taking the back seat and watching what God is doing in this world, you got out there and loved despite the countless amount of barriers in your way? I can tell you that leaving Mozambique would have been way easier if I hadn’t chosen to love so deeply, but then I would have been missing out on exactly what the Lord has called me to do – to love like He loves. What are some things that you are using as an excuse to not respond to God’s command to love regardless of circumstance?
