Learning How to Color

Ten Thousand Homes has just officially started joining in a new feeding program in a community called Clau-Clau. (Sounds like klow-klow)

Every Monday and Friday, we bring what we have. Currently, that is just our hands and willing hearts.

Clau-Clau is so new for us that there’s still one baby who cries every time he sees our white skin.

The need is so palpable there. You can see it in the cracked and oozing skin, the bowed legs and distended tummies, the tiny tatters of clothing and the pools of longing behind yellowed, groggy eyes.

For the past two months, we’ve filled Clau-Clau’s feeding ground with teams and staff who are bursting with energy and hope. And prayed for it to be contagious.

To rise and shine…

…In the boy who just cries, in the boy who just sleeps, in the girl who runs to her younger sibling with curving legs, in the boy wearing baby clothing, in the young women whose reasoning and realities are distorted by mental retardation, and in every boy and girl who go home to darkness, sickness or a shack.

Last week, one of our visiting teams decided to throw a big party for the children to teach them about the eternal party called heaven. Face painting, party-hat making, games, songs, popcorn and cookies! It was a day that made history in Clau-Clau.

And a day that made me pray.

I sat down on the floor with a ginormous bag of crayons and a stack of undecorated party hats that were destined to be made vibrant. Over and over again, I filled a little reaching hand with a crayon. And watched… nothing.

Faces didn’t move.

Eyes didn’t light.

Fingers didn’t grip.

Hats didn’t change.

There was nothing.

Concerned team members looked at me, not knowing if they had offended or crossed some sort of invisible cultural line.

And then I remembered.

I remembered 3 years ago in Mbonisweni when we filled ears with songs, eyes with smiles and hands with crayons. We got the same reaction as we did this week in Clau-Clau. Empty and blank.

The kids could only see blank, plain, nothingness – and didn’t know what to do beyond that. No imagination, no creativity. There was no vibrancy in their lives. They didn’t know how to color.

Slowly, we watched the children in Mbonisweni learn how to hope – from the stability of the regular feeding program in the yard of a church. When starving bellies stopped crying out, when nutrition was served with love, when the word of God was spoken over them, the kids started learning how to play… how to laugh… how to color.

So I did in Clau-Clau exactly what I did in Mbonisweni.

I took those little hands and curved them around the crayons. I kept my big hands on their little ones, and, together, we made squiggles, shape and colors on those plain white party hats.

Eventually, they ventured out for their own squiggles - some of them with squiggly little grins.

Then they realized they could add more colors!

Finally, while squigglers were a’squigglin’, I could put words to what we were seeing and doing.

We were learning how to color.

And so much more than that.

We were learning how to hope.

You can’t see hope. Especially with all the things their little eyes take in every day.

But we have a Creative Creator, who colored and counted the waves, the squiggles and the straights of the hairs on my head, theirs, and yours.

He colored sunsets and stood on holy tiptoes to cap a mountaintop with a snow-kiss.

He didn’t even hold back His beauty from the depths of the ocean floor, placing sandcastles, grain by grain, for magnificently multicolored sea creations.

And He created these little squigglers in His creative image… designed with hope for tomorrow. Sealed with a promise.

Hope is believing in something greater… Juuuust beyond your line of natural sight. Hope is knowing that the One who is worthy came and walked in these deplorable circumstances, and then died so you could have something greater.

Hope is sitting down low in the dirt right where you are and getting ready for the party that’s coming.

You can look at a blank party hat and see its colorlessness - a future piece of trash.

Or you can look at a blank party hat and see a canvas – promise for something beautiful.

Sometimes someone whose hand has beheld beauty needs to wrap around yours and show you how to squiggle. And once you’ve learned to squiggle, the possibilities and promises go higher than that mountain kiss and deeper than that sandy ocean bed.

There are two hands with hope scars that wrap around mine and yours. And He’s set the bag of crayons at your feet.

Let’s learn how to color.

And let’s fill empty hands with crayons.

“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” Romans 8:24