A couple nights ago as the very wiggly, shaved-headed Gabriela lay on her mattress on our bedroom floor, us ready for her to go to sleep but her not yet convinced, I knelt down, cupped her sweaty, round little face in my hands (a technique I’ve begun using every time I want to get her full attention) and said in a high-pitched playful voice, wanting desperately to remind her how much we adore her even in the midst of so many daily disciplinary procedures and frustrating moments: “We are so content that you are here with us!”

A smile immediately overtook her face, and she asked, “And Jolie too?”

“Jolie” is what she calls her older sister Josselyn, who just arrived to live with us Thursday, exactly one week after the little popcorn kernel did. As with Gabriela, we don’t know her exact age, but are told she is between 10-11 years old. All along (as in, ever since two and a half weeks ago) we were planning on receiving both girls after Honduras’ child protective agency’s lawyer had called us, but the authorities had a hard time finding the elder sister because she was wandering the streets collecting bottles until the wee hours of the morning, so she did not initially arrive when 6- or 7-year-old Gabriela did.

So, to answer Gabriela’s question of whether or not we are happy to have “Jolie” with us too, I said, still holding her face in my palms, “Yes! And Josselyn too! You are both so precious – ”

Her response: “You’re my mom, right?”

I laughed, and, to answer the question that she has asked over 1,245 times since the day she moved in July 9, I said, “By God’s grace, I am now – “ and was prepared to give a much longer explanation, but the stop clock on her attention span reached its limit, and she asked, “Now you’re gonna pray for me, right?”

After I stroked her feet and Darwin and I prayed over her, asking in God’s mercy that she may be liberated from such a devastating chain of sin and evil that has up until this point threatened to strangle her, she sat up on the mattress, a large stuffed animal moose in her arms (which earlier that day had asked me what it was, and, not understanding what a ‘moose’ is, she decided it was a sheep) and said, “Sing me the music!”

So Darwin and I began to sing songs of God’s praise over her for about 20 minutes or so until she finally drifted off into a deep sleep that she would enjoy for the next 11 hours or so.

Loving Gabriela is not always easy. It is not easy when she runs away from me at the bank or at the used clothing shop or when she turns her back to me 97% of the time when I call her name and begins to walk briskly in the other direction. It’s not easy when she disrespects her own older sister, seems to have her own agenda on everything (and somehow we didn’t attend the same planning meeting ahead of time), when she tries to shower and change her clothes 4-5 times a day without permission, and when she takes things which aren’t hers (and sometimes are mine).

Yesterday our little bully was disobeying as usual, turned her back on me, and began to scuttle across the front yard on a mission of her own when suddenly I heard a new kind of cry. It wasn’t Gleny’s cry, nor Jason’s nor Josue’s. I paused and then realized that this new cry, a terrible noise, must be Gabriela. In over a week of being with her, I had yet to hear or see her cry or show any form of weakness. I arrived where she was and bent down, and she looked up at me with these huge crocodile tears in her eyes and the most awful expression on her face (it turned out it was a simple scuffle with Jason and Josue – both her age – and she fell down), and I realized this is Gabriela. This – these terrible bone-chilling shrieks and contorted face – is probably how she spent much of her time in her previous life, being used as her step-father’s sexual plaything, enduring horrors that I cannot – will not — fathom. The little rebel, the independent bully, the sassy, loud-talking, obnoxious, jaded little girl who I had seen up until that point – and after that point – is some pseudo personality that has emerged, like a body armor with large, defensive spikes, to protect a heart that has been laid on the chopping block time and again.

So anyways, now we are a family of nine – five girls, two boys, Pa and Ma.

It is worth mentioning that the biological family that Gabriela and Josselyn come from includes five siblings, of which Josselyn is the eldest, and the mother is currently pregnant with twins without any resources or real desire to care for any of them. As the child protective agency’s lawyer shared this with me – not suggesting or asking if we would take in all the siblings, but rather just sharing the information – I sort of felt like by God’s mysterious providence through us He has rescued these two little girls off a large, sinking ship with several other passengers who for some reason were not chosen. That is not at all a comforting feeling, but rather a too-real nightmare, and it leads to a perpetual wanting to do more and more, ‘rescue’ more and more of Honduras’ forgotten youth who wander the streets after dark collecting bottles or are put to use to satisfy the lusts of some.

Thus, a few days ago I felt quite literally like I was in a dark pit of despair, like we could take in 100 or 1,000 or a million unwanted, mistreated children, and it would never be enough. The unfit mother (who probably herself was a mistreated, uneducated little girl) is pregnant with twins, for heaven’s sake! I sat on our kitchen counter across from Darwin as he cleaned out the large bucket he fills with fresh cows’ milk every morning, and I felt as though I was worlds away, drowning in the pain of those unborn twins along with so many others, wondering what grand difference being family to seven makes when there are so, so many.

I felt a strong pull from the Lord: Come away with me. Come find Me in the middle of what you perceive as despair. Come to Me and I will give you rest.

My thought responses shot off in all directions: No – I need to go clean the toilet! Oh, but I should really sit down with Gleny to discuss such-and-such thing that happened… Ugh! I just, I just – Ay, maybe if only I talk with Darwin more, process things. Where’s Gabriela?!

In the futility of my thoughts I finally I gave up and sat down on our double-sized bed, scrunched up in the corner, hoping to somehow be absorbed into the walls as I pulled my long legs up to my chest. I picked up my Spanish Bible and didn’t know where to start, but somehow I ended up in Isaiah, and I knew that what I found was a direct word from my Father in that moment for me:

He said to me, “You are my servant,
    Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.”
But I said, “I have labored in vain;
    I have spent my strength for nothing at all.
Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand,
    and my reward is with my God.” [Isaiah 49:3-4)

As hard as it may be for some to understand, at the end of it all, it’s not even about the children. It’s not about raising two children with tragic pasts or 13 or none at all; it’s about God’s glory, about light shining in the darkness. As much as I love our son Jason (who just turned eight years old July 17^th!), I love him because I love my King, because my King loves him and has called me to love Jason. It’s not about taking kids off the streets and turning them into college graduates; it’s about the Living God entering lives broken by sin and pain and calling them home. It’s about mysteries beyond our understanding being revealed in the life of Jesus Christ as lived through those who carry His Name. It’s about believing that one life being touched with His love is as important to our Father as if a thousand were.

So if one or all of our kids grow up and make terrible choices and fall away from the faith or those twins do, in fact, experience a life of incredible suffering, I still choose to believe that the Lord shines in the darkness, that He will be glorified even in the midst of those who ignore or reject Him, that our small assignment for the King is not in vain, that He has overcome the world and has a sovereign plan.

That in the end, He’s the Savior of the world, not us, and it’s none of my business to worry about results anyway.

(Written Saturday, July 11, 2015): Two days ago I found myself signing the now-familiar paperwork in Honduras’ child protection agency after having received an entirely unexpected call from the agency’s lawyer the day prior.

Our 11-year-old daughter Jackeline and our eldest, 14-year-old Dayana, had asked to come along with me for what promised to be a “wild card” event. Jackeline had gone to use the restroom in the child protection agency’s small downtown building after all three of us had been waiting upon the arrival of the newest member of our family in the case worker’s office. As I flipped through the thin manila folder that contained a pending blood test and a typed letter from the Honduran government legally placing the child under our custody along with zero personal or background information, 11-year-old Jackeline suddenly appeared from her trip to the bathroom with somebody quite small connected to her right hand. Jackeline looked close to tears as she told me that while using the bathroom she happened across our new family member in the hallway en route to the room where we waited.

Jackeline, who has only been with us five-and-a-half months and who has not yet been subject to the generally extreme shock waves that come with receiving someone new into the family, looked proud and gentle and sensitively joyful in a way that I had yet seen her. I gazed upon Jackeline, who is quickly becoming a young woman, and smiled in awe of the work God is etching out in her before I crouched before the little angel connected to her arm. We had been told she was seven years old but looked to be more like five or six (the agency later told us that no one knows her real age because she doesn’t have a birth certificate). Before I could say anything, Jackeline bent down and said to the little angel in the white dress, “This is my mom,” pointing up at me. “She will be your mom too.”

Jackeline told me in an urgent whisper that our new little friend was hungry and that Jackeline wanted to walk with her over to the little window shop on the agency’s property to get her a snack. I sensed that this was a beautiful prompting from God in Jackeline’s heart, a simple expression of God’s love flowing through Jackeline as a vessel into the life of an obviously-overwhelmed (and hungry!) little girl, so I gave Jackeline some money and felt a bubbling sense of joy in my chest as they walked off, still hand-in-hand.

Less than two minutes later I found Jackeline without the snack and instead in tears as she squinted her eyes shut and rocked back-and-forth in my embrace, telling me that in the distance of a few dozen yards as she was on her way to the window shop one of the building’s maintenance men or guards had inappropriately approached her. He had worked at the women’s shelter where Jackeline had previously lived with her mom and little brother for a few months, and he had, in Jackeline’s words, “treated [her] mom as a prostitute.”

So that was the beginning of the story that seems to already have so many details even though it is still so overwhelmingly new. For now she sleeps on a mattress on the floor in Darwin’s and my bedroom until things settle down a bit. Every night – for the two nights she’s been here, that is – I sit on the floor next to her mattress in our small bedroom and stroke her head and rub her feet and sing to her about Jesus’ love until she finally dozes off to sleep. And then I climb into bed and pray for her life and listen over-attentively throughout the night at every little sigh or toss or turn or cough or her occasional sleep-talk as she dozes somewhat acrobatically but profoundly on the mattress not six inches from ours.

Because, you see, this angel has not known what it is to be a little girl; thus far in her life she has been used as her stepfather’s sexual plaything and possibly that of other men as well. Our little angel with a shaved head that reveals more than a couple dozen bald spots on her scalp has experienced the same things that a jaded prostitute has.

Height-wise she doesn’t even reach my belly-button.

The first night our new little angel (Gabriela) was in our home, Gleny, our 10-year-old fireball who has been with us almost two years, was saying things that a generally care-free 10-year-old should say as all of us sat around together. Gleny was explaining somewhat dramatically how her nose is the most sensitive part of her body, and if she bonks it on something, her nose will start to bleed. Immediately, smiling and wanting to join in the quite normal conversation, our newest little angel stated simply: “I bleed from down there,” pointing to her vagina.

So she is understandably aggressive and talks way too much and way too loud and doesn’t listen and hasn’t yet learned how to make eye contact. She makes sexual comments in normal conversation, has to be under constant surveillance because she will try to touch the boys and men around her, tried to undress in front of my husband, typically struggles to follow a simple train of thought, takes her clothes off in public, steals and lies.

On her second day here – yesterday — she, our seven-year-old special needs son Josue and I were up early as I swung them back and forth on two of the wooden swings hung from the porch on our property’s Education House. Darwin had already left at 5:30am that morning to head to work as a music teacher in the nearby city of La Ceiba, and I gazed out across our large grassy property as our cows – the second of which gave birth about a week ago – roamed about in the quiet morning hours. I whispered a prayer asking God for strength and couldn’t shake the notion that this would prove to be a grueling day after having slept only three hours that night and less the night before.

Gabriela generally talks on and on to no one in particular and I’m not able to understand most of it because she has a lisp and dreadfully mispronounces a good deal of the words she uses, but this time I realized she was asking me a specific question so I squatted down in front of her and asked her to repeat what she had asked me. “When’s he coming here? Am I goin’ back there next week?” I asked for clarity, and, yes, she was talking about her stepfather. Having to call her focus back to me several times, I told her a couple inches from her face: “You’re not going to see him right now, and he is definitely not coming here. What he did to you was not okay, and I am so sorry. You can rest now because here he cannot touch you.”

She seemed to miraculously follow that train of thought after having always previously answered me with a far-off and really loud, “Huh?!” Whether I had said, “Time for dinner” or “How are you feeling, Gabriela?” or given a slow, thoughtful explanation of what we would be doing next in our schedule, she always seemed to answer with a bewildered, “Huh?!”

But not this time. This time she went on a rant, saying that she’s gonna put him in jail, she’s gonna jail him. Never getting up from my squatted position next to her swing, I apologized again for everything she had been through and told her that she didn’t have to worry about enacting justice because that was not her job, that God would ultimately do justice in the situation, whether that is eternal condemnation or repentance and transformation. We can trust in God because He is just and good.

She continued yelling about putting him in jail, swinging past me back and forth on the front porch swing, and I gently said, “Gabriela, I know you are mad at him, but it is my hope that God will enable you to forgive him. Rather than hating him, we can pray for him.”

Entirely unexpectedly, she put her short legs down to stop the violent back-and-forth of movement, and looked at me, again without a “Huh?!” and simply said, “Ok,” then looking expectant of something.

Caught off guard, I asked, “Ok…? Oh! Do you want us to pray for him right now?”

That was, in fact, what she wanted, so I put my hand on her shoulder and began praying for the Lord to do a work both in her heart and in the life of the man who took what was not his.

About three minutes later, she asked to pray for him again.

So she calls me “Hey you!” whenever she wants to talk to me (which is about 89.73 times per day) and does a guttural shout to get people’s attention in normal conversation. She holds my hand in tender moments at bed-time when every other waking second of the day seems like full-on warfare. Friday I left her side for under 45 seconds to run and get a toilet brush for Jackeline, and when I came back she was manhandling Josue over a petty fight to see who would get the porch swing (and there are two swings). So Darwin and I stay up until past midnight praying together and I tell her about a savior she can’t see and we don’t stop clinging to the belief in a God who makes all things new.

Thursday, her first night here, as she was changing into her pijamas and I stood in the bathroom with her at her request, holding up a towel to give her both privacy and company, she said from the other side of the towel in her usual straight-forward, aggressive tone, “Hey you! Isn’t it right that you like me?”

I laughed and said, “Yes, I really like you, Gabriela.”

She asked abruptly, “I’m leaving here next week, right?”

Me: “No, you’re going to be here for quite some time. We’re your new family, and we’re not going to mistreat you.”

Gabriela: “Oh.” And then, equally abruptly, almost interrogatively: “You’re my mom, right?”

I laughed again and said, “Yes.”