Personal Jesus

It’s no surprise, I think, that I can’t get over how much I love that girl of mine. It’s what a momma is supposed to do. What does surprise me, but only a little, and thrills me to no end is how much other people love her. From her very start strangers have come up to me to tell me what a joy she is, and wherever we go she is given little gifts and kindnesses and attention. We didn’t buy any souvenirs in Italy, everyone gave them to her for free. In England, men and women stopped what they were doing to play with her, ask her her name, teach her secret handshakes, give her bits of their love. This is not just a momma speaking. At least not completely. There have been too many people - strangers, friends, family, teenagers on the bus - who have loved this kid of mine so immediately and eagerly to think any differently.

When we left England two days ago, I told one friend how much I appreciated the attention he gave her and how he had made her feel welcomed and a part of the community there. He said, “It’s easy when it’s India.” People kept stopping me on the way out the door to take a picture of her before we left and to tell me they had never met a little girl like her before.

I look at her sometimes and wonder at the woman she will become. She, more so than many other children, has been surrounded by broken adults, broken love, broken unity, and yet, I can’t imagine a child being more surrounded by love than she is. She draws people to herself, unafraid, and engages them. She loves so fearlessly and is loved so effortlessly.

We are a mess, all of us adults in her life, and yet still, smashed, crashed, unhealthy and bruised we love her with all of the bits we have left, and I am only just realizing now, how we’ve got each other’s backs, how we fill in each other’s holes and have come together for the sake of this little person who was born into such chaos and has brought so much healing. For now, at this moment, she is Jesus. She is grace walking around with sticky fingers and a dirty shirt. And she is always stretching out her arms and saying the darndest things, not the least of which is, “I love you this much.”