This Valentine's Day was not the most romantic February 14th of my life.
There were no roses or champagne or heart-shaped cards. There wasn't much romancing, and there weren't confessions of undying affection. The candlelit meal a woman might imagine looked more like three rice sandwiches and an overripe banana eaten with a single spoon shared between twenty people.
Unique and ironic as it was, this Valentine's Day I observed Love in a way I'd never seen through the living testimony of a woman named Sara, an unsung hero from Trujillo, Peru.
Sara is a shorter, older woman with beautiful creases of wisdom crossing her face, skin weathered and speckled by years in the Peruvian sun – truly, imperfectly perfect – whose outer body shows signs of her age but whose eyes mischievously twinkle with a light and life that could only come from an internal divinity. Her smile is not full of perfect teeth, but when she smiles it's more likely that you'll notice the intangibles, the warmth growing in your own spirit, than anything externally aesthetic.
She is the kind of woman who will be stopped by no one other than God Himself, and even then I wonder if He won't have a bit of trouble getting her to come home.
Sara works among the poor of Trujillo, running a children's ministry, three kindergartens and a group called Ambassadors for Christ, but the interesting part of her story is that her husband Mario is in prison for 2-3 years after being falsely accused of sexual assault. They've been separated for about a year now, and from what we understand Sara goes as often as she can to visit him, about once or twice every couple of weeks. Though their situation is everything unfortunate and unjust, Sara and Mario have not allowed their separation to stop God from receiving any glory.
On Valentine's Day, seven World Racers were privileged to go with Sara into the maximum security prison where Mario is living and help with four worship services in different cell blocks. What is happening in the compound holding 3,000 inmates is nothing short of incredible. Mario preaches twice a week and has received permission to walk around freely, leading services in blocks that are not his own, while Sara comes when she can and helps him. They know the inmates by name, they know their stories and they genuinely care for each one of the men, some former gang members, some murderers, some embezzlers, some simply having been in the wrong place at the wrong time – yet all the same in the eyes of God and our two guides.
We walked around the prison for close to five hours with Mario, Sara, and other inmates who've received permission to help Mario since becoming Christians after hearing his message. We carried a makeshift sound system, a giant djembe, a worn-down bass drum and other provisional percussive devices that would make any orchestral snob cringe. I had a guitar and a few song sheets in Spanish to lead worship, but Sara thought them too dramatic and so began singing songs into our microphone that I'd never heard before and insisting that I follow on guitar.
What's comical is that Sara was not born to sing to anyone other than Jesus, which made it quite difficult to come up with appropriate chords for her notes.
What's more comical is that singing to Jesus is all Sara's interested in.
We sang songs off key and with incorrect notes, we had technical difficulties, we had translation troubles from time to time… but following Sara's example, we praised the Lord. We watched Love being spread throughout a prison full of convicts in Peru on Valentine's Day, with no roses or candles to speak of. And we watched that Love in Sara's twinkling eyes infect everyone around us, even in light of all the unfairness and hardship surrounding her situation.
I watched someone truly in love sing to her Valentine as though it were only the two of them, truly romanced by the greatest Love of all. I watched her spread Love to the people Love exists to reach, to the people that Love pardoned while hanging on a cross, to the people that today can be in paradise because of such a Love and Sara's conviction to spread it.
And in a strange way, I guess it was a little romantic.
m
