This is What Love Looked Like Today

story from Kaehna (DTS student)

She charged into the preschool, eyes on fire. I stepped out of the pregnant woman’s way as she raced past me and into the Director’s office.

My friends and I exchanged glances. What was that all about? It seemed like she was angry, desperate. But for what? It could be anything, really. After all, we had been helping at a preschool strictly for kids whose mothers were prostitutes.

“Will you join us to pray?” the director asked us a few hours later.

I noticed the frazzled woman from earlier in the day was still with her, slightly calmer than before, but not by much. As the director explained the woman’s predicament, I could understand the fear and fire I had seen in her eyes earlier that day.

The woman, like many of those we have been working with these last two weeks, is a prostitute. She has two young children and another one due in a month. And today, she received what she views as a death sentence for her and her unborn son. She’s “code-red.” HIV-positive. Since she is 8 months pregnant, she is too late to begin treatment to save her son from being born with the virus.

Forget the danger of HIV itself, how will she support her children? With her diagnosis, she will be an outcast, along with her son. Who will protect her daughter? How will her little girl receive an education? Men are already eyeing her daughter who is not even ten years old. She knows there is talk in the brothel that her daughter may have to enter the business soon….

My heart broke for this woman, for her sons, for her daughter. What could we do in this moment but pray? My friends and I joined the preschool director, sobbing, crying out to God to protect this family. Begging God for healing.

A calm entered the cramped office. I could tell the Holy Spirit was with us all, bringing comfort. God’s words came to my mind in that moment: “This is what it looks like to love —- to have your hearts broken and to give all you have in that very moment and put the rest in my hands.Your tears are more powerful than anything else you had in this moment. Thank you for loving her.”

And that is what Love looked like today. Crying with a desperate woman. Smiling at her sweet children. Joining our hearts and hands with hers. Love always hopes….