What Heals

A couple evenings ago, we had a family for dinner in our small rental house here in Chihuahua. After finishing Helen’s delicious Chile Rellenos, the kids ran outside to play in the fading daylight. We pushed back our chairs from the candlelit table, exchanging stories, questions, and hearty laughter. There were some heavier moments, too.

A few years ago, this couple had lost two of their three children. With just one biological daughter remaining, they decided to adopt. Both adopted girls came from horrific backgrounds, and hearing just a fraction of what they’d gone through - much of which only surfaced months or years after they’d been adopted - melted me.

They came from starkly different places, but neither could communicate or relate to others normally when they were taken in.

One girl had been left in a room by herself most of her first six years. She had a vocabulary of only a few words and mostly grunts. The other had been forced to watch horror films on repeat from infancy. She was living a nightmare when they got her at three years old.

This couple prayed fervently for God’s healing and grace and loved these girls as their very own, in the big ways and the small. They began telling and reading them Bible stories and other books, and slowly, things began to change. Words came, and with them small measures of love and trust. The wonder of little children - imagination, joy and all - gradually came alive. They still have ground to gain, but the girls that sat at our dinner table were not the girls their parents described when they were first brought in.

Then there was music. These parents enrolled the girls in voice and piano lessons, and began singing with them almost religiously. They credit music with playing a key role in the healing. Of course, they couldn’t help but give glory to God for all of it, and told us how after one particular prayer, prayed together with their grandparents, nothing had been the same since.

I sat there listening, amazed at how the smallest and simplest things we take for granted can be so life-changing. Some miracles happen immediately, and some happen one bedtime story at a time.

I realized it doesn't matter if our mission field is a foreign country, a neighborhood, or just a living room. There is brokenness, dysfunction, and suffering hiding in plain sight, no matter where you are this side of heaven. And there is healing, too. In bedtime stories, fervent prayers, and at dinner tables.

I'm so grateful my parents never failed to invest their time and attention into raising and loving us. Those kids' books we read every night were teaching us much more than how to read. They taught us how to imagine, how to hope, and how to see the world around us. But perhaps more than anything, they taught us that we were loved, and that our parents cared.