Not What You Give But What You Keep

Deepa is twelve years old. I can't even begin to imagine the life she and her sister have been forced to endure. Today, she is orphaned. Her entire immediate family has died from AIDS.

When she was younger, Deepa's mother died from AIDS. A couple years ago when Phileena and I were in India visiting Deepa, her little sister, Charu, was still alive but very sick and dying from AIDS herself. We found out on that trip to  Chennai that at that time Deepa's father was also dying from AIDS.

It was a hot South Indian summer afternoon. We were visiting the girls at the children’s home where they lived. Deepa and Charu's father came to visit his daughters. He looked terrible. In the weeks leading up to the visit, his health had gotten progressively worse. He would frequently be found passed out in the communal toilet in his slum-sometimes lying in his own diarrhea. The man was obviously in the final stages of the disease. I thought his two little girls were going to splinter his frail bones when they jumped up onto his lap that afternoon.

A couple days after his visit, I got a call. Deepa's father had committed suicide. The humiliation, the pain and the decay of his body pushed him over the edge. He took his life to bring an end to his suffering.

As you can imagine, his daughters were heartbroken. Phileena and I rushed to the home to find Deepa and Charu weeping. We held these little ones close, prayed with them, tried to encourage them with Scripture and promised we'd be there for them when they needed us. Our hearts were broken.

In the sad series of goodbyes that our lives seem to offer us, it came time for Phileena and me to once again pack up and leave Chennai. We spent our last day with the children at the home.

Deepa and Charu stayed close to us the entire day. When everyone had hugged and exchanged goodbyes, tears streamed down all of our faces. We walked past the gates of the home, turned around one last time to wave, and noticed Deepa had run inside. Before we could close the gate, she came running out of the home with a single yellow rose bud in hand.

We couldn't hold back the tears. After her father had died, they cleaned out his slum and discovered that his only possession was a dismal potted rose bush with a solitary bud. Deepa stood there, her face soaked in her own tears, holding out the flower to Phileena. How could we take it? It was her inheritance, the last reminder of her deceased parents.

Today, I take that flower with me everywhere, showing it as often as I can to illustrate this little, tender, revolutionary heart. It is pressed into the place in my Bible where Jesus is in the temple spying on the donors to the treasury.

In the story, he calls his disciples over and lets them in on the scene that's unfolding. There are some wealthy folks making substantial offerings, when out of nowhere comes an extremely poor widow. She puts some change in the collection, probably some near-valueless reworked Hasmonean copper coins. These guys are eager to figure out what Jesus has in mind, but what he tells them must have shocked them. Christ does not venerate the high rollers in the group but points out the widow and claims her as his own. "She's mine," he must have thought. "I choose her." He goes on to say, "All of these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on" (Luke 21:4). The story suddenly became not about what was given, but what was left over-nothing.

Deepa gave all she had-she held nothing back. Her gift to us is among our most treasured belongings to this day.

Deepa's is a completely different context, but it's our same world. She's part of a completely different family, but she's our sister as well. How do we follow Deepa to God's heart? Where do we find the courage to let a little orphaned girl's tragedy compel us to name the complexities in our faith that keep us from generosity and obedience?

Deepa helps me understand that simplicity and poverty, although cousins perhaps, aren't the same thing. Poverty is often chosen for someone; simplicity has to be chosen by someone. But when we follow the redemptive example of Christ, who, "though he was rich, ... for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich" (2 Corinthians 8:9), we start to sense our own eyes being opened.

Adapted from Simple Spirituality: Learning to See God in a Broken World, by Christopher L. Heuertz