On the Day of Pentecost, all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. When the foreigners heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? They are declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”
-Acts 2
Don and I walked into the nursing home behind a herd of little old ladies that had just finished their prayer time in the chapel. We knew none of the elderly residents we came to visit would speak English, so my plan was to look for someone who might be able to speak Chinese. Even though my Mandarin is basic at the pinnacle of exaggeration, it’s a far cry better than my Vietnamese, which consists of one or two mispronunciated phrases. I figured that since these fragile lives represented the greater part of the East Asia region, including China, my best bet would be to find someone with whom I could somewhat communicate, be it painstakingly and with much error.
Funny how God had a vastly different plan than I did.
As we proceeded down the hall, we were told we had complete freedom to enter any room that we wished to visit the patients. We neared a dark, open room near the end of the hallway and jointly decided to enter.
The room was filled with concrete beds, each one with a body on display. Some of the elderly were in good enough health to sit up and coverse, but many were far too weak to raise themselves even into a sitting position. I was immediately overwhelmed with a feeling of gloom, the depressive atmosphere curling around me, leaving me confused as to what I could actually do in this place. It was obvious that these people were living in a constant state of waiting… And what they were waiting on was too heavy for me to contemplate.
I began moving towards the back of the room, and that’s when I saw her.
She was lying on her concrete slab, slightly turned on her right side. Her head was shaved, jagged teeth protruding from her slack jaw, dressed in a very uncomfortable-looking shirt and shorts that exposed the age of her skin and the extent of her malnutrition. Her knees were by far the widest part of her legs, conjuring memories of biology lab skeletons and starvig HIV children in Tanzania. As I watched her, she turned from her side to look up at me. Despite her weakened body and undignified conditions, she looked regal to me. I held out my hand, and her quivering fingers found mine.
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
She contiued to look up at me, never tearing her eyes from mine. Much was being communicated between us without the fumble of words, but I prayed silently,
God, help her to hear what I’m saying.
I spoke to her in English.
“My name is Shan. It’s so nice to meet you. Do you speak English?”
Her eyes never tore from mine or registered understanding.
I then asked in erroniously intonated Mandarin if she spoke Chinese.
This time, her eyes narrowed in confusion. Guess she wasn’t expecting a white girl to pull off such an ill-accented attempt at an East Asian language that she obviously didn’t speak herself.
Welp, God, unless she miraculously knows Spanish, I’m all out of options. I don’t know what else I can communicate to her. Please help me.
A nurse passed by and pulled out a stool for me. I sat, never letting go of her hand or severing eye contact.
After many moments of my thumb circling her veiny hand and my smile boring into her apparent sadness, I began to survey the conditions around me…The conditions she never has a chance to leave.
Her frail body’s only luxury is a concrete bed. She doesn’t even have a pillow. The ever-present heat guarantees that she will never need a blanket, and I watch with increasing sadness as she pulls the uncomfortable fabric of her shirt away from her chest to circulate better air-flow. She keeps trying to reach the bar beside her bed to pull herself up, but God knows how long it has been since she has had the strength to generate enough gravity to lift even her head off this slab.
The longer I sit with her, the more overpowering the stench of her urine becomes. I know that she has had to relieve herself while I sit with her simply because she has no strength to even call a nurse for help. I begin to look around for a nurse to help her, when, to my horror, I notice a feature of her bed that I have somehow overlooked.
A hole is cut in the middle of her slab.
This hole houses a toilet beneath her bed.
I look around the room, an onslaught of tears stinging my unbelieving eyes. Every bed in the room has the same feature.
Do these people ever leave these unforgiving slabs? They seem as stationery as premature graves.
All of a sudden, something wells up inside of me, and I can contain it no longer. I don’t care what language I don’t know how to speak. I don’t care the barriers of age or culture or dialect. All I know is that I see shadows in this woman’s eyes, a loss of hope, the only thing keeping her alive being accursed heartbeats that she cannot will to cease.
I opened my mouth, knowing that the only thing I can possibly do is speak truth. Slowly, articulately, and passionately, I speak to her:
“Jesus says in the Bible, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-burdened, and I will give you rest.’“
Her eyes widened dramatically, as if I had just started speaking fluent Vietnamese. At first, I didn’t understand exactly what was happening, but I felt a very powerful presence of the Holy Spirit upon me as I spoke, so I continued.
“Jesus sent me here to tell you that He loves you. Even though your heart is burdened and you feel forgotten, He sees you. He knows you. He has never taken His eyes off of you for one moment. Of all people in the world, His eyes are fixed on you, and He adores you. Right now, He is beside you while you lie in your bed, and even after I’m gone, He won’t leave. He will never leave you nor forsake you, beause He loves you so much He died for you. Do you know how much you are seen, how much you are known, and how much you are loved?”
Tears began rolling down her face. She tightened her grip on my hand, eyes reflecting perfect understanding of what I had just said, even though I can’t explain just how. Despite the powerful movings of the Spirit I was feeling, I found myself disbelieving the clarity that sparked in her dim eyes and the renewed strength that seemed to double itself inside of her.
I looked deep into the black eyes that had just started to reflect a faint light. I asked,
“Do you understand?”
Her dewey eyes locked with mine, and with lips pursed and brows knit in emotion, she nodded.
What happened next is difficult to covey and impossible to fully explain. But somehow, over the next hour, we spoke to each other. I learned from her that she grew up in the countryside and that she had no family left. Unbelievably enough, a doctor that spoke minimal English corroborated everything that I learned from her. Even more unbelievably, I wasn’t surprised. She asked me to sing songs for her, which I did.
How I understood her, I can’t explain. I know it will take more than a measure of faith to believe this is true, especially since I can’t put into tangible examples or definitive explanations how this happened, because I honestly don’t know how it happened. At moments, she seemed to speak English, although I’m not sure she ever actually did. At moments, I felt like I wasn’t speaking English, though I don’t know what else I would have been speaking. Even though I was fully aware of what I was doing moment-to-moment, when we would converse, I felt as if my Spirit was translating, leaving absolutely no room for my intellect to rationalize how I was understanding the things I was or how she was understanding me.
I saw a miracle of God in that dank room, a ray of His glorious light that outshines the most overpowering darkess. I walked into this room, reeking of urine and death, and I found God. Standing beside every bed, breathing cooling breezes over dehydrated, elderly bodies when the fans break, comforting those that the world has forgotten.
And through the blandness of lumpy porridge and the humidity of the cell-block room, He stands beside her, curls up in her bed and holds her when she feels alone. Even in what seems to be the most frigid hypothermia in the winter of her nearly-ended life, Jesus madly pursues an elderly woman named Tam as if she were in the springtime of her youth. In her despondent loneliness, He gave her not only ears to hear and a heart to understand, but to her feeble eyes that have memorized the stains of ceiling tiles from years of isolation, He has given a new perspective. And from that concrete, refuse-stained slab she sleeps upon every night, she will see with new eyes.
She will see that there is a loving God that allowed her to hear of His specific love for her in a language her ears could not understand but her heart completely comprehended.
And to a girl from small-town Mississippi, He’s shown Himself to be far greater than the stain-glass world in which she’s always seen Him. The In Remembrance of Me etched into the communion table at church was not put there because He is missing, as I had often felt His presence was during the loneliest times in my life. Rather, He is living and active and speaking through me every single day…
Even if I don’t know what language He’s using.
