Day after day I journalled copiously, taking long walks along the beach to watch the sunrise daily and swimming in the deep blue Indian ocean without a speck in the horizon. Day after day I spent time with the orphans and missionaries and patients.
Then one day, everything came together.
And I wept.
And wept.
For days.
on
end.
Everything in my life suddenly made sense. All at once, I understood a significant part of His Big Picture.
It happened when I was spending time with the children at the Baby House.
I was hugging and kissing a child on my knee when another child, infused with jealousy, starting hitting him. I then carried both of them, one on each thigh, hoping to hug both, only to have each of them push the other off defensively, as if worried that the other would threaten the value of my love for him. This intensely jealous behavior happened consistently, every day, with various children, and it puzzled and grieved me tremendously. In them, I saw insecurity, neediness and a craving to be loved.
My heart smarted with pain as I saw the heavy blow on the head of the child I was hugging. I was furious and saddened and filled with anguish. I wanted to tell them they could share, that I was enough to go around, that my love was unconditional and nobody needed to prove they deserved a place on my lap. I loved them all the same. I desperately wanted to tell them they needn’t prove anything to me, but my limited Portugese imprisoned me.
I tried to hold back my tears.
It was then that the first of many revalations were revealed to me.
Those orphaned children were starved of love. And… don’t we sometimes behave in the same way too? The way we covet, compare, become envious? As I tried to hold back my tears, it was then that I had a glimpse of God the Father’s love for us.
He is desperately wanting to Father us, desperately wanting us to know His love for us is unconditional… But we strive, we try to ‘be good’ to gain His approval and attention and become insecure when others seem to have a place with God too, as if disregarding His infinite capacity for parenthood. We envy, we desire things we see, we are filled with insecurity at other people’s achievements… without realizing how deep and wide and long God’s love is for us and how He desperately aches for us to know.
Oh, in that moment as I burned with pain and heartbrokenness to tell the orphans that I loved them all the same, I felt His desperation for me to know that too.
During my time with the kids, I could help but notice Willee. Willee is Bully of the Baby House, or at least, that was what I thought. Whenever he was around, another kid would be hit, pushed or terrorized. He would snatch their things, or pick them up from behind and squeeze them and run away, with the poor child sobbing his heart out. The houseparent would nurse the terrorized child, scold Willee and the cycle would continue.
One day, Dr. Eric, the missionary doctor whom I admire greatly, pointed out to me that Willee’s mother was mentally unsound and his father had abandoned them. As a result, acting out was simply his way of getting the attention he needed, whether it was negative or not.
In him, I saw my own rebellion and how that ached the Father’s heart as much as Willie’s behavior ached mine. Yet, because I knew of his scars, I had no desire to punish and loved him no less than the others. In that, I felt God’s love for my flaws, that He loved me- lies and sins and all.
Suddenly, a conversation I had with a longterm missionary the night before struck me. Her name was Antoinette, a beautiful 25-year old red-haired girl who had been serving the poor in Africa since she was 18 years of age, away from her family who were all missionaries in different parts of the large state of Mozambique. “We call our place a Children’s Home and not an orphanage,” she explained, “because we want our children to grow up knowing they have a Heavenly Father so they don’t carry an orphaned spirit.”
All along, it was I who had an orphaned spirit, I heard Him say. What about you?
My neediness, insecurity, bitterness with parts of my past and loved ones, self-striving, and the roots of anorexia… Were all birthed from that orphaned spirit of not feeling like I had grown up being loved enough. And the repeated reminders of the Rainbow, a symbol of Hope, was His way of assuring me that He had a hope for me, for my complete healing.
In the midst of the orphans, I finally saw, that the orphaned one… was me. And I, like the broken children, had been living my self-striving, self-sufficient life with an orphaned spirit, without the actual knowledge and deep understanding of being truly loved and cherished and parented.
But the promise of a rainbow stuck on to me.
During my stay at Arcos-Iris ministries, I noticed one thing: that Love was freely given and poured out upon every person and child. That included me. As I remembered the Rainbows as signs He had given me for my healing, I looked back and saw just how much affirmation and healing He gave me in that short but intense period of time.
In the sewing shop run by widows at Arcos-Iris, I came across a piece of Rainbow cloth which I had hoped could be sewn into a capulana (traditional African wrapskirt) but the shop had run out of it. It was Antoinette who touched me the most by going to great lengths to meet with the in-charge, to ask if he could go to town to find the cloth for me, to see if he could make it in time before I left… She knew what Rainbows meant to me and really hoped for me to leave with that as a souvenir. A beautiful South African nurse I had met there also went to great lengths to help me find that boat of cloth in town.
One day, pretty convinced that it was not meant to be although I was thoroughly touched by their efforts, I asked Antoinette, “Why did you go to such great lengths for me for a Rainbow capulana? It’s just a piece of cloth.”
And she looked at me with eyes so bright and a smile so pure and chirped, “It’s not the cloth that’s important, my dear. It’s you! YOU are important!”
I wanted to cry.
Through her, God had not only revealed to me my orphaned spirit, but had also shown me how she had every reason to possess an orphaned spirit but did not. After all, at the tender age of 18, she had left family to work as a missionary in Africa. She could have been bitter that her parents chose to work in another part of Africa away from her, she could have been bitter at God that in this forgotten part of the world she was not married, she could have been resentful and tired of the dirt and the people and the rice and beans every day… but she wasn’t. She was joyful, full of hope and peace on her face, because she knew… she had a Father, and her Father loved her so.
The day before I left, a villager who worked in the kitchen of the Home gave me a capulana. It was a Rainbow capulana! For someone like her, in her poverty, to give me something so precious touched me profoundly. She refused any form of monetary or gifts in return at that moment, and said she wanted me to have it as a gift because “she saw me as a daughter.”
a new capulana I’d bought her just before I left. She said she would wear it to church!
I saw, how incredibly crucial this healing was for me, how important this sense of being Fathered and not orphaned was in light of the grand scheme of things. I had a burden for orphans because my orphaned spirit identified profoundly with their rejection and abandonment. Yet, God wanted me to see how much A Father He is to me, and how crucial reconciliation with my own parents in every way is, because only then, can I truly be a parent to these children.
One of the children told me before, ‘ I have no mama or papa here with me. But I have a Heavely Father who loves me.’
That Rainbow, was hope for me, that I could shed my orphaned spirit to be truly Fathered by God.
I don’t need to strive, or feel insecure or act up in the same ways I did before at home because I can look back at my bitter roots, forgive the people, forgive myself and at the risk of sounding blasphemous, forgive God for those times in my life I thought He wasn’t with me. I can replace those judgements and inner vows with a full measure and knowledge of His love for me.
God didn’t need to, but chose to show me the full measure of His extravagant love by his repeated and consistent display of rainbows in my life.
There is an orphan in all of us. What’s important is how we continually bring it to God and ask Him to deal with it for us.
He is a Father to us. His love is unconditional. It is undivided.
Sometimes, it is even extravagant. He goes the extra mile to create a Rainbow, or many rainbows for us, to remind us how much He loves us.
And because of that, we can rest secure.
-John 14:8