Small

A newborn cry echoes from the small shelter. 

Helpless, vulnerable, baby. Mary responds as a mother does, wrapping her baby up tight, warming him.

Joseph watches and wonders what to do next. What now? 

Small, He started small, came small to us to teach us to see small things as so much more than they are. He needed warming, needed to be wrapped tight, to be held, to be loved. He needed parents.

Joseph places hay in the manger, and Mary places God there. Together they look at the baby. Right there, a picture the world will paint a billion times over. And Mary and Joseph have no idea they are living a timeless painting in real-time for tonight. They are real people, very much alive, breathing, exhausted, uncertain, new parents, awed by the smallness. 

 Six years old and braver than any soul I know. 

She held back the tears she had every right to spill out all over everyone. I sometimes wonder where she cried them. Where did they fall? 

“I’m only here for a little while,” she would tell me. And the season came and went leaving a trail of years behind them. 

“My mom is almost done preparing things for me to come home.” She would say. 

The truth was more than a child should ever know, and for many years she didn't know it, but then one day, she learned. Walking down the street, she spotted her mom, and the brave girl's excitement grew. "

Mom! Mom!" she called, but even when her mother saw her, heard her cry out, her mother turned the other way. “She must not have heard me.” the brave girl told the others, trying to smooth the truth from her mind. She held back the tears and walked home. When I saw her come through the doors of the Desert Rose Shelter, she was fire hot angry. She gave dirty looks and stomped up the stairs. The other girls rolled their eyes, calling her by her well-earned nickname,  "Boss." 

The anger burned for weeks and glowed red. Then it cooled down. What happened after the cooldown is what makes her the bravest girl I know. She began to make plans. “Teach me English, please,” she asked. 

"I'll need to learn English if I’m going to be a good director." 

She went on to tell me of her future. She would study hard, become the most intelligent girl in her school, learn to read so well that her mother would ask for her one day because her mother could not read. "I'll read everything to her and help her," she told me with confidence, “and then one day, I'll become a director of something. A real boss who will change things for people,” she added, “change things for children like me.” 

No one could help children "like her” more than this brave girl could, for she knows what it is like to need so much, to hope so much, to want so much to be loved.

I suppose the world turns out two kinds of people—those who meet needs because of their experiences and those who cause needs because of theirs.


"I have a lot of things I want to tell people," she told me. "That's why I need to be a boss." 

I imagined her a grown woman. Grown past the hurt and grown into the solution. A 'real boss' who began as a vulnerable, frail, and helpless girl. That kind of boss could lead with an unprecedented love.