Mighty to save

“She’s there,” Jennifer told me.  I peeked over her shoulder and saw the little girl I’d known last summer in class 4, sitting outside the shack she called home.  We’d come to her house outside Meru that day to try to rescue her and bring her back to Tania.

This girl’s mother is mentally challenged and unable to properly care for her daughters, which is why this little girl came to the Tania Centre in the first place.  Eventually, she asked to visit home.  It’s only natural for her to want to see her parents, no matter how poorly they had taken care of her.  But, when she went home for the December holidays last year, her parents never sent her back to school.  The Tania Centre has called several times asking when she’d return, always with the same answer: maybe next week.  But next week never came.

Which is how we ended up on the edge of her family’s property that Saturday, hoping to be invited in, hoping to bring her home with us.  There was no gate that we could see, so when the father allowed us to come in, we had to climb between the barbed wire to get in.  The house was a two-room shack, barely the size of my bedroom in my apartment in Virginia.  There was no electricity, no running water, and the latrine out back was built of sticks and plastic bags.  They had maybe half an acre of land, but it looked like little to no attempt had been made at farming it.  Piles of garbage, littered with empty liquor bottles, sat around the front of the house.

The little girl I’d known to be smiley and fiery-tempered last year sat on a log in front of the house, picking at the dirt.  There was no smile on her face, and she barely acknowledged us when we greeted her.  Though she was wearing boots, the feet of her father and little sister were clearly riddled with jiggers, so I could guess that hers were, too.  I saw no fire, so it was likely that they hadn’t eaten that day.  Everything about this place made me want to grab these two little girls and take them away to where they could be properly taken care of.

We stood there for a while, Jennifer and Joseph talking to the father and each taking the girl to the side of the house to talk to her privately.  After what felt like ages, Jennifer told me that, since the mother wasn’t home right now, they couldn’t make any decisions about bringing the girls back to Tania yet.  We walked away empty-handed.

It was hard to walk away that day from those two little girls, not knowing what would become of them.  It’s hard to leave the kids at Tania at the end of the summer, when all I really want to do is keep loving these kids as if they were my own.  I could have the biggest heart in the entire world, but that doesn’t make me capable of saving everyone in the world who needs to be saved.

Thankfully, God doesn’t ask me to save everyone.  He doesn’t even ask me to save anyone.  He just asks me to love who I can, where I am, and he’ll do the saving.  And, since God is everywhere, he’ll take care of the ones I can’t.  He’ll hold those little girls in Meru until they can be held by someone who knows how to care for them.  He’ll hold my little ones at Tania until I can return and hold them again.  And he knows so much better than me how to care for them.