Beauty from Ashes

I have been struck (again) recently with how sad the lives of our clients make me. We had a girl come in to our social work office today and just burst into tears. I went out and sat out on the stairs with her while we waited for her social worker to come from another building. I put my arm around her shoulders (even though I’m not sure how okay she was with that, since Khmer don’t usually use physical touch as a way to comfort a stranger) and asked her if I could pray for her. I spent some time praying for her, with only a slight idea as to what the problem was, based on what I already knew about her case.  We found out her husband had beaten her, AGAIN, and she was too scared to go home. We found an NGO for her to stay at over the weekend, only to find out later, she doesn’t want to stay there. She is going to stay at her sister’s instead, even though that is the first place her husband will look for her and he has already gone there to find her one time before – with a knife in hand. This guy is not my favorite.

We are afraid of having a stranger mug us and beat us up someday on the sidewalk. Imagine living with someone who you are utterly afraid of and who beats you up every day. We often are filled with a lot of fear thinking of someone breaking into our homes to steal something from us. Imagine having someone from inside your house steal things from you all the time and you have to sleep with your valuable possessions (such as a land title, you finally got paid off after months of high interest) wrapped in your arms across your chest to protect them. This is reality for almost all of our clients day in and day out, and it just struck me today how incredibly SAD that is.

I want hope. I want renewal. I want Jesus to just sweep through these girls’ hearts with the full power of the Holy Spirit and turn them into whole people with no remnants of trauma. And yet, God chose to give us, as humans, that job. Not to erase parts of these girls’ lives away like the trauma never happened, but to bring wholeness and hope and renewal to their hearts. God could do it on His own, and yet we truly do have a power to heal that God lacks. It is the power of being able to say “I’ve messed up too”. Yes, Jesus came to earth and learned what it was like to be a human, but He never sinned. As humans who sin like it’s our job (not that I am proud of that), we are able to go to another sinner and say “I’ve messed up too. I have hurt people I care about too. I have been cruel too. I know what it is like to hurt because of someone else’s sin.” And then we can extend grace out of our sin. God cannot do that because He has never sinned. That’s why we will do even greater things through the Holy Spirit than Jesus did. Because we sin.

I hate that sin is part of our world. I HATE that Satan delights in girls being gang raped and abused. I hate that my sin is as ugly as the sin my clients’ husbands commit which makes me so angry. But God is so good at bringing beauty from ashes and bringing good from evil, that even the fact that we sin and will always sin while on this earth, cannot hinder God’s power from working strongly through the weaknesses of His bride, His church.

So at our Friday church service that we have every week with the clients, I spent a lot of time looking out at the clients that I have come to know over the last 8 months that I have worked at Daughters. I do see beauty among the ashes. I know their stories – abuse on every imaginable level, betrayal, family members in jail, awful housing conditions, continually returning to the person who they imagine “loves” them – I see all those ashes and trauma that have been left behind after the fire. But I also see beauty. I see them responding well to a staff member who we have recently found out makes them feel like “prisoners”, “slaves”, and “rubbish”. I see them talking and laughing with each other, resting their hands on each others’ arms and legs like Khmer girls do so often. I see their beautiful smiles that give no hint to all the ashes that lay beneath the surface. And so God is faithful to bring beauty from the ashes. Just like always.