On every trip, there’s always at least one conversation that I can’t forget.
For me, that was on the way back from ministry the very last day.
Honestly, I was tired. We’d spent the day at an after school ministry for at-risk kids in the city. My team played soccer, helped with VBS and put on a mini-VBS, cleaned out a building, etc. My knee was hurting (it’s taken forever to heal) and my stomach as well, so I spent part of the afternoon sitting, planning for the afternoon/evening, and praying for my team, while watching to see if there was something I could jump in on. We left there to walk around a public park, and when we left, I was more than ready to get home.
(Not the full team, but this is a lot of us!)
But we still had to take a very crowded rush hour bus.
The first one that came by was packed. So many people were standing in the aisles that not even one person could get on.
We re-grouped, decided to split up if the next bus was as busy, and got ready for the next one. “Go, go, go!” we encouraged the people in front of us as we pushed on. (Public transportation in other countries is very different; you can’t be polite. They will push on, so you have to push as well, or else you’ll never make it on. And we had 20 people who needed to get on that bus).
Thankfully, we made it. I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to get comfortable in light of standing for half an hour in the aisle. Eventually the crowd moved a bit and I moved forward until I was close to an older man standing next to a seated woman and child. He keep looking down at them and smiling, so I assumed he was with them.
I tried to space out and not think about just how much I wanted to sit. Or a shower.
Towards the end of our ride, I saw the man watching the woman and child again with a warm smile on his face. Then he looked at me and made a motion with his hands. My sign-brain just kicked in, “Did he just sign ‘beautiful’?” I had to know.
So I signed back, “Are you deaf?”
He lit up, nodded, and started signing.
I wish I could say I understood everything he said to me, but I didn’t. When you sign to someone in a country that speaks a different language, you have to use 3 languages: Sign, your first language (English in my case), and the language of that country, Spanish. So I have to use the sign for “church”, but instead of using a “c”, I have to remember that the word for “church” is “iglesia” and use an “i” instead. It’s extra-challenging, since sign isn’t part of my everyday life. Or Spanish, for that matter.
And I’ve never been fluent in sign; I just picked up a lot of it when I was younger, thanks to my first five mission trips being to a deaf school in Jamaica, being a part of sign club in high school, and personally teaching myself to sign all of my favorite praise songs as a kid. Reading it is a lot harder than speaking it, as well.
So basically, like Spanish (and probably English as well), I speak it well enough to get myself into trouble, but not well enough to get myself out of it.
It seems like every country I go to recently, I run into deaf people. From the deaf JW in Cuba, to a little boy in Peru, to our vendors in Thailand, God keeps giving me opportunities to use sign language for His glory.
I do know that among other things, this man, Juan,* told me that he takes that bus everyday to and from work. And that the woman and child weren’t his family. He’s just a gentle man who was looking out for them. I was able to tell him why I was in Ecuador and how long we were there.
Our conversation didn’t last super long, and Juan’s fingers were flying. I just kept nodding and smiling, trying to comment when I could, and signing, “I don’t understand” when I had no clue. When we left the bus, he came by to say “Good-bye” and wish me a good journey back to the States.
But I can’t stop thinking of him, riding the bus every day, silent in an otherwise noisy world.
What does he normally hear?
Our team spent two days in ministry at a special needs orphanage (Camp Hope) in Quito. The children there mostly had cerebral palsy, amongst other special needs. The evening after our first day, we were debriefing the day, talking about the kids we interacted with.
(A mural at Camp Hope)
We were talking about how even in the midst of extra-challenge, many of these children (and young adults) had great joy. They might have struggled to talk, to sit, and to even move, but there was nothing inhibited about their laughter.
Their hearts were free.
Because our team talked a lot about what it meant to serve and hear God without distraction, around the end of the convo about the orphanage I threw this out there: “I wonder… these precious children of God who we have such great compassion for, who maybe can’t see or hear or move or talk or dress or clean themselves… I wonder if they hear God in a way we can’t. I wonder if they are closer to God than I am.”
I kind of left that comment hanging, instead of finishing it with a conclusion. But one of the participants finished it for me: “Because they don’t have the distraction of our full ‘abilities’”.
It’s one thing to see things as television, extra-curricular activities, books and video games, and even things like jobs, school, responsibilities, and relationships as distractions. It’s almost mind-altering to think of things so many of us take for granted: our senses, physical capabilities to eat, clean, and even dress ourselves… things we would consider “basic” or “normal” …. as even a distraction.
How many times do I let even things like physical sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch distract me from hearing God?
What do the children of Camp Hope hear, see, feel (and etc) that I can’t?
The man on the bus, Juan, what does he hear in the silence?
Earlier this year, I talked about the power of being remembered. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Nok Nok, a woman I met on my first trip to Thailand in 2011. I still hear the surprise in her voice, saying, “Wait… you remember me?” And the unspoken: “But why do I matter to you? Are you saying I matter?”
Hopefully, the deaf man on the bus left our conversation feeling seen (and heard)… not by me, but by God. My prayer is our conversation made him realize that he wasn’t invisible to God… but loved extravagantly. That of the hundreds of thousands of people in the city of Quito, Ecuador, that day… the fact that he stood on a bus next to a foreign missionary who could passably speak his language made him feel seen by (and on the mind of) God.
There’s something about those moments, the moments when God “breaks” through the distraction of the busyness of life—the clamor of the voices in our heads (and all around us), in the laundry and the bills, the adventure of summer days and even late nights lying awake in bed—the moments when we cannot deny that the God of the Universe is saying (and we hear in our hearts): “I see you and I love you”… that can leave us speechless.
I feel like that is the message I share when I’m on the field… not only with those who I’m ministering to in that country, but my team as well: that they are seen, known, and extravagantly loved by an Almighty, all-loving God.
Such a beautiful, life-changing, unforgettable conversation of hope.
