Knit One
His toe nails are torn and packed with dirt. At the ankles there are sores, old and new, bravely trying to heal. The child is six, perhaps, and lies coughing on the old couch in front of the stove. March winds howl while the temperature in this packed room varies, depending on how much trash mom throws in the stove. "The doctor gave him shots four days in a row," his mother explains, waving her hands at bottles on the back of the couch. "Now he's on antibiotics." But it's not helping his fever. The cough is really most likely from the incineration in the living room, or his mother's smoking. The shots and drugs they've paid for are probably only making him more susceptible to the next round of flu that will come around. Without proper care, they will have little impact, even if they could be effective. This is underlined half hour later when the child quietly gets up and goes out barefoot. No one notices him until he returns with potato chips from the corner store. The younger children try and grab some. Mom only notices when a fistfight ensues. She slaps them both soundly. So the handicapped daughter goes out to get the youngest something to eat. Meanwhile, the cough and fever increase, but no co-relation is comprehended. It's challenging, biting one's tongue. In earning this mother's trust, I must choose carefully which battles to focus on. Today the main issue she already humbled herself in was honesty. Breaking all cultural rules, she asked forgiveness for lying last week. She is learning to move in the values of her new Kingdom, where she has discovered the miracle of Grace. It is so far outside the realm of what she knows to receive forgiveness, that she is stunned by it. And we must tread carefully, that she does not pendelum and view it as cheaply available in an ecstacy of wonder. But there is little time to dwell here. The four children clamor; the stove must be fed; and technically I'm here to teach mother, daughter, and niece to knit.
This is huge. There have been several attempts to get the mother to sell her thirteen year old to the local pimp to pay her former husband's gambling debts. To knit means to have the means to keep the wolf at bay. It was in a desperate ploy to convince me she could knit that she lied. To have to face that she can't is not just that the monster is at the door; it's not just that she's also trying to protect her niece, who's father is dying of cirrosis and whose mother has already gone to be a prostitute. To need to learn to knit underlines to her that she is illiterate; that she is a single mother of four with no skills. She feels shame, but as we praise the stiches forming on the needle, she brightens. Plucky, she summons all the courage and memory of her grandmother's flying needles, to form the wonder that others who have called her stupid can do with ease.
Meanwhile, her daughter quietly learns in the shadow of her mother's vacilating emotions. Her occasional bright smile shows that she carries much less baggage. But her cousin breaks my heart. Skinny and dirty, with ill-kept hair, she perches on the edge of the couch convinced that she can't manage. Her shoulders sag, her fingers are all thumbs. She's been told she is stupid because she's left handed. I prove this to be a myth by being a lefty myself. She's sure she can't learn because she was thrown out of school for being stupid, but she so desperately wants to prove herself wrong. "In who's strength do we do all things?" I ask her. "Jesus?" she says, timidly. I nod. "And He won't let us fail." She takes courage. Finally the stiches obey. Ecstatic, she almost looses them all with her bouncy waves. Of course those which slip off make her shoulders slump again, but before long she dares to try once more.
Only a week ago she made the dramatic choice to accept her Savior. She was sure she was too bad. This is what her world told her. Too bad for school; too bad for mommy to take along when she left; too bad - so daddy kept drinking. Fist fights, tantrums, and lies are what she knows best. But when we choose to celebrate her one week Birthday; she smiles, and she finds that she also knows the words to many worship songs. For years some of our friends have faithful sown the seeds of patient faithfulness and offered prayer filled love to this and other children like her. The season has come when these dear friends must move on, but like Paul and Apollo passed discipleship relationships on to one another, they are weaving us into the lives of these new Believers. Prayerfully, we are seeking to receive the baton by faith. As this child belts out the words off key, we pray she will be given space to grow in the Lord in this storm filled environment.
We pray together before we leave, and the mother asks about the sores on her son's ankles and cough. Then we feel freer to give a little advise. Gentle, warm, soapy water soaks daily, and socks before he goes out. Bones from the butchers, cooked with onions, garlic, and a teaspoon of vinegar for the cough. But we dwell longer on the solid little knit square, and the hope and power it represents; the proof that she - that each of these three women - are strong and have a future worth preserving in the Grace that now fills them with Light, Life, and Forward Movement.