This Indian Heart

I would say I’ve always been a dreamer, in every sense of the word. When I was a little girl, I played with my baby dolls and dreamt about the day I would have real babies to call my own. When I was in college, I dreamt of traveling the world and a life without the responsibility of school. I have a tendency to always look ahead for what life has next, which can be both good and bad as it often deters me from living fully in the present. Consistently though, I’ve dreamed of living a life that doesn’t look normal or routine for most people. I’ve put a lot of hope in the fact that my life can look different, if I choose to play my cards wisely.

As most of you know, this fall quarter I got to live and learn in one of the most amazing corners of the world for my last quarter of college. Every day in Guatemala, I was given the space to explore, run free with my thoughts and dreams, and soak in the world around me. The experience gave me the chance to learn the complexity of textbook matter first-hand, and to ask the hard questions while they stared me in the face. It was four months of sheer refreshment and “Pura Vida” (Pure Life in Spanish), as if I were dunking my head for the first time in a natural spring. Those months felt like an undeserving gift handed to me to enjoy for my last moments of college. I finished college in Guatemala and I had the world at my fingertips. In Guatemala I had space to dream, so I did. I dreamed so big that at the end of the day, I felt overwhelmed with all of the passion I found in myself for so many different things and the varying routes they could take me on. I was brimming with hope for the things God could do if I just decided to say “yes”.

One night in Guatemala, I had a dream in my sleep that woke me with a veracity that I knew I wouldn’t be able to run from. In this dream, someone was asking me bluntly “What do you want? Don’t think, just answer. What do you honestly want?” I responded, “I just want to be a mother to the motherless.” In the first moments of that early morning in Antigua, those words repeating themselves in my head, I knew then what my purpose was. I know children who need mothers. I know they are at Sarah’s Covenant Homes in India and I know my time there isn’t finished—it’s actually just beginning.

3 years ago, I went to India for the first time to work with Sarah’s Covenant Homes, a non-profit organization that rescues abandoned children with special needs. I was totally captured by India and the children of SCH, to say the least. By the end of my summer in India, I went home changed like I’ve never been before. I returned the next summer after a seemingly long year apart from the children who won my heart over. And my heart has remained discontented apart from this country and these children ever since. 

So this September, I will be moving to Hyderabad, India to become a foster mother for Sarah’s Covenant Homes. I will be caring for somewhere around 10 children who have recently been rescued from government orphanages where they have been very severely neglected. Because of the unfortunate caste system that still remains alive in Indian society, being born with a disability inescapably throws them in a category of very little to no worth. The children of SCH come to us malnourished, abandoned, and uncared for. The mission and heart of SCH is to claim these unseen children suffering in the margins of society, nurse them back to health and wellness, provide love and care in a family style setting, and place invaluable worth on every life that comes through their doors.

When I was 13, I was captivated by Jesus. I fell in love with Him because of the heart of who He is. I read story after story in the Bible about Jesus touching the untouchable, making clean the dirtiest of sinners and stopping entire crowds of people to bend down and look at the unworthy woman on the ground at his feet. It’s without question that God’s heart is where the unloved, the invisible and the dehumanized are.

I want to be where His heart is.

I want His story to be mine, too.

            I can think of no greater honor than to love these children as if they were my own, and I am humbled that God would allow me to return to the country that first showed me the power of such a love three years ago.

God has been faithful to my wandering, restless, back-and-forth spirit. Through all of that, He’s protected what He’s placed in me before I was even born. And God will protect what He knows will bring Him all of the glory.

“Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 1:6

So here’s to life taking a new turn! I’ll see you on the road.