Love, Love, Love, Love, Love

These past couple of weeks have been crazy, for lack of a better term: back to back teams, hard news from home, and just pure Alajuelita craziness. Through all of that, though, GOD is showing me more than ever that I need to depend solely on him to be my rock and solid foundation when everything else around me is… crazy. Last week included a knife fight between two men at the Refugio, a man possessed by a demon, and the death of a fifteen year old friend of my sister’s back home. Each of those situations rocked me and I want to explain how GOD was in each of those events, but please forgive me in my omission of details about those incidents right now. Right now I want to explain what happened today.
We are building a house for a man in the Celebración Church family with the team this week. The site is up on the mountain with minimal accessibility requiring the team members to either be shuttled there in the ministry cars or to make a substantial walk from the nearest bus stop. Today I ended up being left at the site with a small group of guys as they finished putting up the walls of the house. With very little to contribute I was feeling pretty useless and really wishing I had somehow found a way back down earlier in the day instead of standing in mud and rain with no purpose. Dan, a group of team members, and I started the walk to head back down via bus when we stumbled across a woman lying face down in the dirt on the side of the road. After initially passing her by, Dan suggested we turn back to make sure she was ok. With a crack pipe in one hand and a lighter in the other it wasn’t surprising that it took quite an effort to wake her up. After struggling to understand her slurred Spanish slang, we managed to invite her to have lunch with us and then pay for her taxi home.
Last week, Dan and I had a conversation about his passion for beginning a ministry similar to Freedom 424 (check out their website if you want more info: www.freedom424.org) to reach out to prostitutes and women on the street of Alajuelita. When we were talking I was incredibly excited about the idea and very interested in helping out. Interestingly enough, however, when GOD placed a street prostitute right in my path I was having so much trouble loving like Christ. I don’t know why but when I imagined the kind of women and girls we would encounter I imagined them to have a sense of robbed innocence about them, eager to receive love. In my fairy tale idea of a prostitute (if there is such a thing) I did not imagine her smelling like she lives on the streets, I did not anticipate her to be high on crack, and I did not think she would be carrying a knife. So when we met this woman and began walking down the mountain I had a legitimate fear that she was going to pull a knife on us, and the fact that I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying did not help assuage my fear that she was out of her mind. In my head I was thinking, “GOD, this is not really what I meant when I said I wanted to reach out to the community of prostitutes in Alajuelita.” And if I am truly honest with myself what I really meant by that was “GOD, I want someone who is easy to love.”
My heart began to thaw towards her as I saw the way that people treated her; men called out rude things from store fronts, she got nasty looks from elderly women sitting on their front porches, everyone acted as if she had the word PROSTITUTE tattooed across her forehead. Once we sat down at the little soda to eat she turned to Dan and said plainly “Thank you for your respect.” My heart completely broke. She is a human being, a child of GOD, just like me, and she is used and abused like a piece of property. Most likely, her only human interactions include prostituting herself and buying drugs and no one takes the time to just sit with her and ask her name. This is the kind of person who needs the love of GOD more than anything else. Yes she is a prostitute, she is a crack head, she smells, and she is impossible to understand but GOD loves her and calls us, as the body of Christ, to love her as well. I am humbled by my reluctance to love when it is hard and so grateful for the experience I had to learn how to do just that. Thank you all for all of your prayers, I apologize for the sporadic nature of this blog. I hope this finds you all well. GOD BLESS.
Becca