The step outside her home turned from solid burnt orange sand to murky mush, threatening those attempting to enter. She sat on the weaved mat floor side with her small child attached to the breast as she narrated the fifty percent love her current husband shows to her child – the one from a different man. She sent him away, her son of 10 years, to protect his heart from the truth of his conception.
When she lost her parents at 14, she and her siblings remained alone in their house – providing and caring for themselves, accepting handouts from neighbors and community members, and attempting to continue their education despite lacking school fees. By the time she was old enough, she travelled to the capital city to become a house girl – desperate for work. Eventually, she became a waitress at a restaurant. She would rise early and walk in the night to attend her morning shift. One day, she was met by a group of men - robbers. They stole her belongings and all the money she had. As the others departed one stayed behind to steal once more. He raped her and proceeded to strangle and drown her in a stream – holding her head beneath water until she went limp. Dead, he thought.
When she woke, she found herself alone. No purse, no money, and an unsightly memory of the horror committed against her. Weeks later she discovered her conception – a baby boy brought to life in the act of tragedy. She gathered what little she had and returned, pregnant, to the village where she had grown and the house that remained empty after all the years she and her siblings had fled. She tended to a garden, growing her food, and birthed her baby without a soul; her parents long gone, and her siblings too.
She testifies that it was God alone that saved her that early morning from dying dead in the stream. She knew God’s grace then as she knows it now – the daily bread that sustains; the life breathed in to drowning places; the redemption of what was lost and stolen; the beauty conceived in brokenness.
We walked together to the space affront her house. The orange dirt turned mud where footprints lingered. Her dress fell gently against her skin. Her smile was easy. Her children smiled, innocent to the atrocities their mother endured on their behalf.
Her story is like many and yet her outcome is far different.
She has a beautiful son. He is 10 years old and is the second oldest of five. He attends school – the school she fought to continue attending after the death of her parents. And now he has been referred to an organization seeking to empower vulnerable and underserved children and families. She calls it God’s grace.
But imagine, many stories mirroring hers end in further tragedy – babies conceived, babies killed. Babies killed, mothers killed. Babies conceived, babies birthed, babies abandoned. Babies abandoned, mothers left desolate – victim to the stealing.
God’s grace.
And what not more than a testimony of God’s character – to lead, provide, and bless us in love as we, wholly broken and desperate, seek to walk in what is honorable even among what is tragic.
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