The three of us—Mary, Scovia, and I—became fast friends as I took them on their first motorcycle rides and gave them their first ice-cream cones. The discovery of the bathtub complete with running water was almost more than they could handle; they must have bathed forty times that first week. We could hardly understand one another, seeing as I had learned only limited Luganda and they spoke almost no English, but still we were having way too much fun.
Meanwhile, we were spending a great deal of time at the hospital with Agnes, taking her meals and praying with her and leaving her in Oliver’s care when we could not be by her side. A week later, she was discharged with the diagnosis of a broken collarbone and extensive soft tissue damage, which was excruciatingly painful and made walking difficult. She moved in with the three of us.
I quickly discovered that Agnes is a born leader. She can befriend just about anyone. She is outgoing and engaging, and she has a trustworthy quality about her. She is often ready to laugh but has a serious side that enables her to see things as they are. She is mature for her age, she knows right from wrong and is quick to set people straight. She is set in her convictions, knows what she wants, and will not easily let anyone tell her she can’t have it. I was not accustomed to having such a strong personality in the house, but I was delighted.
I looked around for places these precious girls could go but found nothing satisfactory. Slowly but surely, we were becoming a family, and I would have only the very best for family. They had no living relatives capable of taking care of them. An orphanage was out of the question, in my opinion. The only option would be adoption by a family or by me.
Knowing what adoption would entail, I thought trying to accomplish it would be crazy. I found myself desperately praying that God would show me what to do. And that is when it happened. Shy, five-year-old Scovia tiptoed into my room and watched me curiously for nearly ten minutes without saying a word. And then, as though she had been pondering the question for ages, she asked, “Can I call you ‘Mommy’?” And absolutely no one would have been able to say no to those big brown eyes. We were a family. The answer filled up my heart and then my whole self and spilled out of my mouth as naturally, as if I had always known, “Yes. I am your Mommy.”
In researching and talking to various government officials I discovered that one must be twenty-five to finalize an adoption in Uganda. The child has to be fostered for three years in Uganda before an adoption can be made final. Believing that we had exhausted all other options and this is what God was asking of me, and knowing that I was willing to commit my whole life to these children, I began the process to foster them and, later, the longer paperwork process of legal guardianship. My yearlong commitment to Uganda had turned into a lifetime commitment, but I believed that the Lord was confirming that these were the next steps He wanted me to take, so I eagerly began the process that would one day lead me to finalize the adoptions of my new children.
I was Scovia’s Mommy, and Agnes’s, and Mary’s. We had only just begun the daunting process of paperwork to make it legal, being visited by local chairmen and government child welfare officers and signing mountains of documents, but the relationship was forged in our hearts long before we got our stamped foster papers back from the courts. We adjusted quickly to this new life together and in no time it seemed that we had been family for ages. A few months later I became Mommy to two more beautiful, amazing girls. As biological sisters, twelve-year-old Prossy and nine-year-old Margaret had each other as family, but they needed more; they needed a stable home where they would be well loved. Originally, I thought once again that we would love on these sweet girls until I found somewhere better for them to go, but we all fell in love and Agnes begged that we make them a part of our family forever. How could I argue with a little girl who knew what it was not to have a loving home and who wanted to share hers with others in need?
Prossy and Margaret are tall and thin, appearing to be closer in age than the two and a half years that separate them. Prossy is sweet and quiet, respectful toward people, and deeply reverent toward God. She loves to learn and applies herself diligently to her schoolwork and her study of God’s Word. She is a young woman of prayer, an individual of integrity, and a person of great promise. Prossy is a lover. Never in my life have I met a more sensitive or generous child or adult. Prossy truly grieves for those who grieve and rejoices when those around her rejoice. The simplest pleasure delights her, and just the thought of someone sad, hungry, or lonely deeply hurts her tender heart. Prossy is intuitive and uses this gift to try her very hardest to always please her family and her heavenly Father.
Margaret is simply hilarious and wonderful; joy just radiates from her. Margaret was quiet and timid at first but is anything but shy today! Margaret is spontaneous and outgoing. She has a wonderful sense of humor and a beautifully kind heart. One can never quite tell what Margaret is plotting behind her sparkling eyes. Her desire to help others laugh makes her likely to play jokes on people, but in the most good-natured way. Margaret is a wonderful listener; she makes people feel cherished and important. Everyone wants to be her friend. She is curious and inquisitive, wanting to understand the world around her and the people in it. She has big dreams for her life, and I have no doubt she will fulfill them.
As I thought about these girls—so different as individuals, but all so full of life and potential—who had moved into this house in the village with Christine and me, I could hardly believe it. Just months earlier, I had wondered what I would possibly do with my big house, but I never doubted that it was exactly the place God wanted me to have. It seemed enormous, but in less than a year, our home was filled with five precious girls. God had given this home a family. And with these precious souls around me, I knew that He had given me a home.
We relished getting to know one another and learning the ups and downs of this new family. It was incredibly challenging and beautifully wonderful all at the same time. Anyone who has ever added a person to the family knows that each new individual brings new responsibilities and dynamics.
With fostering and adoption, especially in the case of older children, there are even more challenges. My children called me “Mommy,” and I so longed to be their Mommy, but building a relationship takes time, and going from being just a caregiver to Mom takes a significant period of bonding and trust building.
I wrestled with God as I thought about the hurt my children had to experience in order to become a part of my family. I had no idea what it felt like to be a nine-year-old with the responsibility of looking after my younger sisters. I couldn’t imagine watching my father die and then having my mother run away, too afraid to carry the burden of my life on her own. I had no idea what it felt like to spend the first twelve years of life without knowing a parent who would cover me in love. I grieved these things for my children, and I always will. I fully trust that this is the way that God intended for their lives to unfold and that He is working all these things for their good, but there is still real pain in my heart when I think about all they have had to endure.
With each child, the pain and trauma manifested themselves in different ways and through different behaviors. I spent more time in prayer than I ever had in my life, begging God to teach me how to be a good enough mother to these priceless gifts, asking Him to guide me as I blindly dove into this blessing called adoption.
Physically, I was exhausted; I laughed to remember that I thought I had been tired before! I was thankful to have Christine to help me with the laundry, as simply learning to cook meals for more than one person was taking longer than I ever dreamed it would. I was waking up in the middle of the night to soothe someone who had a bad dream, double and triple checking that everyone had taken her medicine, brushed her teeth, and put on clean underwear. I was waking up two hours earlier to cook a real breakfast and make sure we all got to school on time. By God’s grace, even in the hard moments, I knew that the job of being a mother was what God had created my heart for. We had our struggles, but a
t the end of the day, we were each in love with this new thing we called family in this new place we called home.
I knew that God had brought me to Uganda not just to change my heart for Him and for the poor but to make me Mommy. I am Mommy when I gather the girls into a large circle for a family meeting and when I watch them all run and play in the local swimming pool or picnic beside the Nile River. I am Mommy when several voices join together at the dinner table and say, “Thank you, Mommy, for food” (they aren’t always the same fourteen voices, but almost invariably, several girls will express their gratitude at every meal), and when they get excited because Friday night is movie night and they want to watch The Sound of Music one more time. Here in my home, I am not a missionary or an aid worker; I am just a mom. I am like most other mommies—wholeheartedly dedicated and devoted to the children God has given me. I get tired and frustrated at times because I am human. But I relish my life because it is God’s plan and I can’t imagine anything better.
My fourteen beautiful girls call me Mommy. Four hundred children in the community where I live who have lost their mothers to starvation or disease or something else equally unimaginable call me Mommy. Because so many children are constantly shouting this word, even a lot of adults in the villages around our home call me Mommy. “Mommy to many,” they say. Dignified men, store clerks, and parking attendants call me Mommy. Teachers and the doctors at the local hospital call me Mommy. I hear it in shouts as I drive down these insanely bumpy red roads; it is sung as my daughters burst through the door when they get home, it is whispered in my ear as I wake up each morning. It is hollered with joy or sobbed with longing for comfort. And every time I hear it, my heart leaps.
I am willing to bet this is how our heavenly Father feels each time we whisper His name, each time we shout it with joy or cry out in pain, every time we tell Him exactly what we need or feel:
“Father, I trust you.”
“Father, you will protect me.”
“You are my comfort place, my safe place.”
“You are mine and I am yours and we are family.”
His heart leaps and He delights in us and this is unfathomable.
ONE DAY . . .
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
It is a house of many cultures, many languages, and many colors. It is a house of laughter, and tears, and sometimes frustration, but mostly elation. It is a house of praise and worship and thanks. It is a house that is usually teeming with children, laughing and dancing and singing and just being kids, something many of them have never had a real opportunity to do. It’s always a loud house, and it is always a grateful house. It is my house. But mostly it is God’s house.
When I began renting this house last October, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with it. All I knew was that if the Lord had given me a house it couldn’t be just for me. I knew that whatever I did, I was to use this house for the glory of my God. Well, once again, His plan for me and for my house was, is, greater than anything I could ever have asked for or imagined. My house has become a safe place not just for me, but for hundreds of others. Children are here for lunch and dinner daily. They sing and play soccer in the front yard, color pictures, and do homework at the kitchen table, and make huge soapy puddles in the bathtub in their enthusiasm for bathing. They delight in the simple things, like when I shave their heads to treat their ringworm or rub their feet with paraffin to draw out the burrowing jiggers. They soak up the Bible stories I read them like little sponges and never stop asking for more. They laugh hysterically when I cuddle them or kiss their foreheads, and it hurts my heart a bit that they find the fact that someone loves them so funny. And that is the blessing God has given me in this house: I get to provide a home for children who are homeless, a safe haven for children who feel threatened, lost, and unwanted. Most of all, I get to love children who don’t know love otherwise. I get to accept them for who they are. I get to present them with my love and then teach them of the Father’s extravagant love.
The house full of termites and bats, the house that has taken more hours and shillings to repair than I ever could have imagined. The house I have fixed and painted and scrubbed for hours and days and weeks, the house I have sweated and cried over in desperation . . .
This house has become a home, not just to me but to hundreds. It holds my heart. It holds so many lessons. It is a place where children can be children, where people can know that they are important and special and loved. It is a place where people accept Christ and learn about Him and grow in Him. It is my house. But mostly, it is a house of the Lord.
6
A CHANGE OF HEART
Her name is Sumini. When I met her, a lively student in my kindergarten class, she was five years old but looked to be no more than three. She was thrilled to be learning her alphabet, and she loved to color and to sing. When she sang, her little voice was high-pitched, breathy, and filled with passion. Now, as she lay fitfully on a bed in my house, her boundless energy was drained by disease (malaria), her bright eyes dulled by hunger, and the dance in her step stilled by the crippling effects of poverty. My heart literally hurt in my chest as I watched her struggle and prayed more intensely than I’d ever prayed in my life.
As I sat up late that night trying to keep her alive one minute, one breath at a time, I had to ask myself, Why do I have so much? And why have I always had so much? Why do my family and friends have so much? And do they even know that far, far away from the luxuries of the western world, a little songbird of a girl is fighting for her life? The roles could have so easily been reversed. I wondered how God had chosen me to be born into such luxury when this little girl had been born into such hopelessness. I thought, She is a girl with as many hopes and dreams as those who rest peacefully in air-conditioned houses protected by alarm systems. Yet her body is on fire with raging fever; my sheets are soaked. And right now, she has no one to care for her but me.
My heart began to break over and over for the other children around the world who had no one to protect them, no one to speak up for them, no one to sit up with them at night and control their fevers. Who would hold them? Who would sing to them?
At some point in the night, Sumini smiled at me. In the dark, her black face blended right in with the night and all I could see was the flash of her teeth. I knew that Sumini would not die, not that night, because God had put me there to make sure of that. He had put me there to hold her. He had put me there to give her a sponge bath every hour and ibuprofen every four. He had given me the provision to afford the malaria treatment that her other family members could not. As I continued to pray over Sumini that night, God brought to mind the disciples who, when they encountered a man blind from birth, asked Jesus what the man did to deserve his condition. Jesus replied, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life” (John 9:3). Disease is certainly not a sin. And poverty is not a sin; it is a condition, a circumstance that allows God’s work to be displayed.
As God kept me awake to pray vigilantly for the welfare of the little girl in front of me, something changed in my heart.
I knew God wanted me to care for the poor, I had been doing it as best I could for a long time and it had become almost all I did with my life over the past eight months. It had happened so naturally, I was simply caring for those around me out of an overflow of love for Christ and the love that He had lavished upon me. I never thought I was doing anything different or unusual, just simply what He had asked. But that night as I lay praying and fighting for this precious little one, and over the next weeks and months as I poured over His Word, I realized that what I was doing was not simply my choice—it was a requirement. I wanted to give even more! I wanted to do more for the people who needed help and I wanted others to rise up and do the same. I didn’t want to simply care for these people, I wanted to advocate for them. I wanted to raise more awareness for these voiceless, unseen children. I was exploding with a new enthusiasm not just
to care for the orphaned and needy children but to encourage and help others do the same.
I wanted people who were warm under their down comforters to know that there were other children like Sumini out there, all alone. I wanted to tell her story.
I knew we couldn’t all just pack up and move to Uganda, but I so desired to make a way for others to help, to care for these children, to do what Jesus requires. I wanted to tell them all about what I had seen and experienced so they too would know.
I saw over and over and over again in Scripture where God instructs us to do everything in our power to care for children just like these. Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14). Sumini was to be my sixth daughter. The first month she lived with us we visited many different doctors, all of whom were concerned that she might not live much longer because her spleen and liver were so enlarged due to severe malnutrition. Every time we left a doctor’s office, I felt discouraged by the prognosis. Sumini, however, never had a discouraged bone in her body. She is a fighter. And she would not be beat. As it turns out, God truly did want His work to be displayed in her life, as her spleen and liver miraculously began to shrink back to normal size. With good feeding and lots of love and nurturing she once again became a healthy, happy little girl.