It was a day I had dreamed about for years. Four years to be exact. It would be the day that would mark my arrival to womanhood by participating in a rite of passage all young girls endure but soon learn to love and indeed sometimes even live for.
I was going shopping!
It was a tradition started by my maternal grandmother. On a grandchild's tenth birthday she would take each out for a day of mall shopping. (Not to be confused with shopping of the blue-light variety that you suffer through with your mother and all siblings in tow.) Mall shopping meant Toys R Us and Dilliards, up scale shopping with a cookie and soda all your own from Mrs. Fields.
After my initiation (which garnered me among other things a black leather mini-skirt and black vest which my mother deemed too streetwalker for a young girl and promptly returned much to my fairy godmother's and my chagrin) I felt special, loved, set apart.
Less than a month later I would go with my church to carol at a local Children's Home. My heart ached as I understood what the presence of these children meant. They were the unwanted, the unloved, the set apart because of behavioral problems.
And I wondered who would take them shopping on their tenth birthdays.
The next year I determined that I would compile all my birthday money. I would march right into the Children's Home and pick out my very own orphan to take shopping, stopping only to buy them any flavor of Mrs. Field's cookies they wanted.
Until my mother explained to me the logistics and legalities of doing such an impossible thing. And reminded me that real life doesn't play out just like the movie Annie.
Undeterred, in my later teen years I found ways to find these unwanted and set apart children. I would volunteer in a similar home, participate in after school inner-city programs, and visit camps where such children were made to feel for the first time loved and wanted and set apart for who they were, not for what circumstance and unfit parents and economics had allocated for them.
Today I find my days full of children of my own. Children who I pray will never doubt that they were and are wanted, that they are loved, that each holds a special part of my heart. After having my firstborn I wondered how I could ever love another child, even my own, the same way, with the same intensity and fullness.
And then, as every mother knows, the mysterious mathematics of love are introduced into your life. The same way that infinity divided by any finite number is still infinity so is a mother's love. No matter how many times it is divided it is still available and offered in it's same fullness and intensity and depth to the next. And the next. And the next.
Experiencing full days with hands full, I still knew my heart too was full. Still able to love more. Able to love somebody's forgotten child. Wanting to find other children who could use more love, more attention, more direction than perhaps their parents were able or willing to give.
Every other Monday night I tell my husband that I have found my children. This year, all 25 of them. Children that come from broken homes, impoverished homes, homes of neglect or homes missing the constant presence of parents. On such Mondays they greet us with mile wide smiles, eagerly awaiting us to open the doors to their hour and a half of love.
An hour and a half of basketball and skill development might not seem a significant offering. But when that time includes affirmation that they are amazing, that they are talented, that they are worthy of merit and when it includes a character lesson that can serve as a tool for bettering themselves in a belittling world and when it is delivered with a firm but committed insistence and when it includes a sharing not only of my love and the others serving with me but of God's affection for each, it becomes nothing less than an evening of love.
I, we, are there because of our love for them. The love we share is one that we have experienced first hand from God and desire to pass on and on and on. A love inexhaustable. Because when we have done all the loving on them that we can do, that's when His love for them takes over.
Possessing enough love for Adwale, Kwame, Samuel, Meech, Alunga, Sydney, Ricky, Deng, Danny, Joseph, Jessica, Yashina, Umed, Eugene, Enes, Jerry, Tyrone, Mohammed, Samir, Wesley, Tammim, Hope, Chelsea, Frankie, Elias, and Jose is a daunting task for even the most benevolent of mothers' heart.
But when it's God's love we share and offer, that, only that is a love truly and literally sufficient to stretch by infinity.
To infinity and beyond.
My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to
love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another,
God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in
us—perfect love! I John 4:11-13