As you know, this month the squad is in India. My team is partnered with team Pleres, working with a ministry called Indian Christian Ministries (ICM). Part of ICM, called Sarah’s Covenant Home (SCH), is a home for children with physical and mental disabilities and we are blessed enough to get to volunteer there this month.
I remember our first day at SCH. We got there in the afternoon with the sun blazing down on us, and a courtyard full of children walk and run up to us wanting hugs or handshakes or high fives or just to hang off you like you are a human jungle gym. There are over 80 children who live there, and while I’ve had a little experience with children with disabilities and special needs it is not something I am accustomed to. The adjective I would use to describe our first day at the childrens home – overwhelming. But as the days go by and we start to learn names, faces, and actually get to know the kids, the place starts feeling less overwhelming and more natural.
Our role at SCH is a myriad of things from scrubbing the squatty potties to loving on and praying for the kids. With temperatures usually around 42 – 45 degrees (that’s about 107 – 113 for those of you working in Fahrenheit) the kids get hot! Because a fair amount of them are immobile and the majority of the kids there need someone to help them get water, the kids get quite dehydrated and lose their appetites which only makes things like weakness and responsiveness worse. So we go around with red squirt bottles and squirt water into the kids mouths…it kind of feels like a water fight on days when the water is actually cold because the kids giggle and smile and jostle to get water. Underneath everything our eyes see, despite the barriers that stand in the way of their expression, and beyond the framework that we have of understanding their “disabilities”, they are still children. Children who want to dance, sing, run, jump, play games, and laugh with you. Children who want to be hugged, kissed, tickled, and thrown in the air. Children who, like every other child, just want to be loved. Children who are valuable, who deserve wholeness, who deserve to know what it feels like to run and play, or sing for joy, or tell you stories, but somehow and somewhere along the way they were robbed of those things. That thievery breaks my heart and makes me feel helpless, like I’m just another body in the room that these kids don’t know and won’t ever remember.
Having a physical or mental disability in India basically means that you, as a person, are cursed. You grow up being an outcast and often times being left to fend for yourself, or even left for dead.
I sat on a bed with a little girl who has primordial dwarfism on my lap, while I watch Leslie and Chelsea plead the Lord for healing and thank Him for the healing He is going to do. It reminded me that I am so much more than just a person in a room, that I am not helpless, and that my role is more than toilet cleaner/water giver/human jungle gym. The things I do are made holy by His holiness. And the prayers we pray are powerful and effective. This is our life, this is what real life should look like – where healings are an every day event, where prophecy comes out as naturally as laughter, where we sit before the throne of God and ask expectantly for His hand to move.
Real life is expecting the little girl who can’t walk and the little boy who can’t speak and the little girl who can’t sit up to stop having “can’t”s describe them. Real life is expecting her to walk, waiting for him to speak, and anticipating the moment when she sits up. Real life is when the moments we see miracles happen fill us with awe because we saw God do it again and again. Real life is taking children who are outcasts, cursed, and worth less than dirt and calling them precious, beloved, and royal!
Their culture sees them as cursed, but we see them and love them as so much more.
