Hope Africa

As we walked up to the house I was confused because she was lying on the front porch, splayed out on the ground. It took me a few steps before I noticed that she only had one leg, and she had a rough handmade “crutch” lying next to her.

We were told that there lived a widow nearby, so we decided to spend a day figuring out how to take care of her. I was so distracted by the strangeness of it all that I almost missed it. Her face was shining and somehow that smile broke through all the weariness and haggardness of her world. I started to pick up the trash that lay around the place that she called her home. As I finished stuffing the trash into a bag, I circled around to the front of the house where she lay and almost immediately tears came to my eyes.  My friend was rubbing moisturizing cream on this widow’s hands and arms and the widow’s face gave a look as if heaven had just met the earth.  My own face was covered with tears because it was true, the Kingdom of Heaven had lovingly crashed into this front porch and my heart swelled inside my own chest with a sort of compassion that I can only describe as God’s own swelling heart for His broken and fallen humanity.

In that moment I knew what Jesus meant when he told us, “Whatever you do for the least of these you also do to me.” I saw Christ that day. He was a widow with one leg and torn clothes to wear, but His face shone like the sun.

Ruth was not much younger than me, but I guess all of those years of not eating made her look smaller. It all becomes something much bigger when you meet people that are just like you but for some reason have been given a life that is scarily different.

Ruth wanted to know everything about me. Usually people ask you about school or about what you like to do and that’s about all they ask you and you are lucky if they remember it all the next time they see you, but Ruth wanted to know everything and she wanted to know it well. She’d ask me about “The States” and I’d try to tell her about “The States” without saying something that would make her sad. I was trying to figure out how to tell her that in “The States” I never had to worry about some of the stuff she had to worry about, so all I kept saying was “it’s different.” And it is different here, but some things are the same. We all want to be known in the way that Ruth wanted to be known and wanted to know me. She kept looking over at my dad and smiling saying, “is that your dad?” I kept telling her that it was and that, to a girl that doesn’t have a father, must have been something amazing to her. But really, at the end of the trip, Ruth was what was amazing to me.