South Africa has been a month to remember. I have learned so much about love this month; what it means to love others and to be loved by others. We worked with a preschool called Ithemba this month. Each of us had a different morning class that we were in and each of us had an afternoon class of grade school kids. I felt so much love all month from the teachers and from the beautiful children we got to work with.
My morning class was a 5-year-old class. There were 21 students in the class and their teacher’s name is Azah. I got to work alongside her and help her with whatever she needed. My favorite thing to do was just spend time with the kids. One little boy, Aphelele (Ah-pay-lay-lay), always brought a smile to my face. Every time I walked into the room, his face would light up and he would give me a huge smile and a hug! It warmed my heart to see him every day. He was always happy and smiling, even when he was being mischievous. One day though, Aphelele made a mistake, and I saw the joy leave his eyes.
We were doing an assignment in class where the kids had to color different sized circles and cut them out. Then they had to bring the circles up to me and I helped them glue them together in order of their size. There were seven circles that they had to bring up to me. When Aphelele brought up his circles, he only had 4 of them. I asked him where his other circles were and he didn’t know. I told him to go look around his desk to find them (with translation help from Azah, of course). He went back to look for them and found one under his desk and brought it up. I told him there were still two more missing. Azah told him to go find them and they weren’t at his desk. He had already thrown away his scrap paper. He started looking through the small trash where the papers were and he found another circle, but he couldn’t find the third one.
I watched as he began to get more and more upset, and eventually started to cry. After I finished helping the other kids, I went over to him at the trash can and looked through it with him. I kept telling him that it was okay and that we would figure it out. He just continued to look downtrodden the whole time. We couldn’t find the circle in all of the trash, and he began to cry more. My heart was breaking for this sweet, normally joy filled, little boy. He had made a small mistake, and to him, it felt huge. I pulled him into a hug and told him that it was okay and that we would fix it. I got a scrap piece of paper and drew him a new circle and went with him while he colored it in and cut it out. When we brought it to the desk to glue them all together, he finally began to smile again.
God doesn’t usually speak to me as something is happening, but He very frequently allows me to understand Him more through the situation as I think about it later. What I realized through this is that sometimes, I think we do things that, to us, feel like the end of the world. But to God, it’s as easy to fix as drawing a new circle for us. He wants to be there for us when we’re feeling down. He wants us to run to Him for help rather than trying to search through the trash so we can fix it ourselves. Just like all I wanted to do was hug the sadness right out of Aphelele, our Daddy wants to hug and love the hurts out of us. He is a good Father and He loves us with a love that we can’t even understand. Let your Daddy love you through your mistakes and your hurts and your pain. Let yourself feel that love, even if you don’t think you deserve it. Because the truth is, you don’t deserve God’s love; none of us do. In fact, what we deserve is death for our sins. But God doesn’t give us what we deserve. He gives us the free gift of unconditional love. We don’t deserve it, and that makes the gift all the more precious! Let God love you; I promise you that it’s worth it!
