A City of Hope

It happens during playtime.

We are sitting together off to the side but still surrounded by children running and playing all around us.

A ball rolls over to us and we gently kick it back in the direction it came from.

I look at her. This beautiful teen girl with soft, dark brown curls adorning her sweet face. 

She proceeds to tell me her story. 
It is a story of unimaginable pain and abuse. 

She tells me I am the first person she has ever opened up to in the six years that she has lived here at the home.

She tells me that she has not even one happy memory from her childhood. Not one.
I tell her I believe that God has already begun her story of redemption.
That He wants to redeem every hurt, every pain, every happiness and childhood innocence that was taken from her.
We talk a little bit about her hopes and dreams.
After she leaves, I sit by myself and try to piece it all together.
To process all the details of her life she had just shared with me and connect it with the sweet, shy precious girl I have come to know and love this summer. 
God, why this girl and her little sister that I have come to love like my own? 
Why them?
Just...
Why?  
.........
And then.
Life goes on.
Just like that another heavy-hearted night passes by.
I go about as usual.
Morning comes. A new day. 
I write her a letter filled with Bible verses.
Verses of God's promises and His love to her.
Telling her I am praying for her healing and restoration.
That I love her. I give it to her. Praying and hoping more can be done for her.
Praying for the rest of all the teens and children at the home with similar pasts and unspoken pain.
Once again I strive to reconcile this with the God I know, love and serve.
Father to the fatherless.
Comforter.
Healer. 
Savior.
Everlasting.
My best friend.
Jesus.
This is when it hits. This is when it's real.
When I realize that I have spent almost the entire summer in a home of abandoned, orphaned, mistreated children and it really sinks in.
That every child I have to come to love and know personally is walking around with this unthinkable pain that I have never known.
Father to the fatherless...
I think of all the Bible verses about God and orphans.
All those verses that say that God Himself cares for them over and over.
The verse that says that He will never leave US as orphans. That He will come to us....(John 14:18)
He does care.
This I believe.
And that is why I am here and why this children's home exists.
Why the church exists.
The Lord will take US in the Bible says.
We.
We have been taken in.
We were not forsaken.
We never will be. 
And so we the church must do the same.
Take them in. ALL.
In our neighborhoods. Communities. Cities.
Internationally.
Children who suffer from abuse and neglect all around us. 
The innocents.
Just as Jesus was innocent.
Bruised, abused, beaten, and unjustly mistreated...
He knows what it felt like to be abandoned in that moment on the cross when He called out for His father...
He knows. He understands.
He took me in.
He has taken us all in. 
When we didn't deserve it.
With a love more faithful than the true love of a good father or mother. 
May every hurting heart..every abandoned, mistreated and abused heart come to know Him. 
He who heals, restores and redeems.
May every heavy heart including my own cling to the hope that is found only in Him.
In this Ciudad de Niños, the City of Children, may we find our hope only in you Jesus.


For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me in.-Psalm 27:10