Guess How Much I Love You?

To say that this weekend was a difficult one is an understatement. The reality of the statistics of Swaziland have hit too close to home...with the ways that AIDS & the orphan crisis are defining this country. I had tried to prepare myself as well as I could for the all night vigil & then funeral for Gogo Lily...which is difficult in so many ways. But I was able to stay awake all night & followed along fairly well for the 9 hours, even though it was all in Siswati. It is a difficult thing to sit in grief for that long & to walk slowly through the process of saying goodbye & burying a casket. We have made it far too easy in America & go through it so quickly! To sit and watch all day as people dig the grave on the homestead, to see them prepare the food for the meal, to think through logistics of how to light up the area for finishing the digging at night, to hear the sounds of 300 people singing as a casket is carried across the homestead, to see the men of the area taking turns to shovel dirt into the grave, to see the women of the area gather rocks for marking the grave...overwhelming is an understatement!
But the thing I wasn't prepared for was the rest of the day after the funeral, once the family & friends had gone back to their homes. I got home from the funeral (which was right outside my fence) at about 6:30am on Sunday & took a quick nap. When I got up I tried to have a normal morning before church starting (at the team house where I live, so sleeping wasn't an option). After church I slept another hour or so before being woken up by a knock on the door. It was 3 of the girls who live next door & were taken care of by Gogo Lily. Throughout the afternoon they stayed around (as we do most weekends), coloring, sleeping on the concrete & singing. I was wishing I could communicate more with them but knew that they needed my presence more than anything else I had to offer that afternoon. I was trying not to think too much about what life would be like for these girls & the rest of the seven kids that Gogo Lily cared for, but God wanted me to think about it. To think of the reality of a 13 year old cooking for the other children, to think of all of them sleeping alone in a building, away from the other adults on their homestead. To wonder who would do their laundry, cook their food, pay their school fees, and look after them on a daily basis. God wanted me to sit in this pain and reality...and it was uncomfortable.
One of the girls asked if there were any books to read, so I went & grabbed a stack of children's books inside. But I lost it when the first book she pulled out of the stack was "Guess How Much I Love You?" The book is about a couple of rabbits, where the mother is reminding the child how much she loves it. Tears started flowing as I let the depth of this reality hit me...these kids didn't have parents who had shown them love in tangible ways or even were around on a daily basis. They wouldn't ever have biological parents to read a simple children's book like this to them, and they had just lost the woman who had shown them parental love for their lives up to this point. As the tears flowed down my cheeks, my heart was broken at a new level for these kids. But then, out of nowhere, one of the girls started singing, "Jesus loves me, this I know". God was reminding me that even though these kids won't ever know the love of a biological parent, they can know the love of the Father and, as hard as it is to believe, that is more than enough to transform their lives. And as we walk forward in these days, praying and talking about what roles God is calling His people to take in this difficult situation, I am reminded that He is their true Father and loves them much more than any human ever could. Guess how much He loves us...

"For this reason I bow my knees before the Father...so that you may have strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge."
Ephesians 3:17-19