Please leave me here, God. Don’t send me to a rural village in China to work at a special needs orphanage.
That literally sounds like the worst ministry ever.
I told You the other day that that is the one thing I just can’t do: work with special needs kids. You already know I can’t do kids. Why do I have to go there?
I don’t want to redeem all the past children’s ministry months.
I don’t want this to be what leads me to greater dependence on You.
I don’t want this to be the area where you break me down.
I don’t want to be miserable.
But I don’t want to choose joy.
Why, God? Why?
This was a prayer I wrote the day Summit team leader Ah-be-guy-ul sat us all down in a living room in the middle of the Nepali foothills and announced our ministry for the following month in China. The day I decided God clearly must not like me that much after all, let alone my squad leaders. I’m not a kid person, in case we all forgot, and special needs sorts of things have always made me uncomfortable.
Turns out, my expectations were crushed like dust beneath the feet of reality, as usual.
Our “rural village in China” is a city of 500,000 or so (classified as small, by Chinese standards), with a sky you might occasionally see if you can wait out the smog.
We live on the tenth floor of an orphanage among the children of Eagles Wings, a program of six family group homes. Each home is run by a staff of ayis (“aunts”) and contains ten or so kids with various mental and/or physical disabilities. Our ministry assignments included assisting at the Eagles Wings school; helping with the day-to-day things like feedings, changing diapers, and entertaining the kids; and taking them outside (or to McDonald’s).
Of course, the first day we walked in and met the kids, I felt a little like an astronaut on some obscure alien planet… But once we started hanging out with them; learning their names; getting a feel for their quirks, habits, and hang-ups… the game changed.
These kids are awesome. Their joyful, hilarious, sometimes bratty but mostly sweet personalities were unhindered by the slightly to severely modified bodies that housed them.
It didn’t take long to fall in love with them.
To learn that Ji Lan likes playing in the dirt, scooping it up and pouring it out with whatever tools he can find, so grab some plastic cups from your kitchen and bring them outside with you.
Ja Ni likes holding flowers, breathing in the scent of each one, rubbing the petals between her fingers, so pick a bunch of them for her.
Fu Chang likes building LEGO formations and has a very specific idea of what he wants each one to look like, but cerebral palsy keeps him from being able to accomplish the vision himself, so be his body for him.
Li Ju is a little stand-offish but will sound off an enthusiastic (and contagious), 'Wooooo!' when she gets excited,
Sha Li will use your chopsticks to pick the gross ginger balls out of your rice bowl,
and Yue Zhang will be more than happy to share her sunflower seeds and her lice.
It’s funny, the way God works on you and changes everything. The way that, when you ask to be more like Him – really ask – He answers you. Every time I exhaled a brief God, please help me to love the kids today prayer, it happened. Every time I thought, Well, I could either be doing this sort of annoying, inconvenient thing, or I could be watching TV, I then thought, I’ll be doing something either way, so it might as well be something worthwhile. Every time I stopped and wondered How would Jesus love this child right now? What would He do? He gave me His eyes to see.
And, really, isn’t that how it should be all the time?
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