Manuela
/A few nights ago we celebrated with Shelby and Lane, Manuela and her daughter Liliana, about Liana's graduation from high school over dinner at our house. It was a delightful time with delicious food, a wonderful company. My time with Shelby has come to a close as she will be gone for the next month in Israel. My time left with Manuela seems painfully short and I've come, once again, to find that I just don't understand God's timing.
Part of trusting, the beauty of trusting, the beauty of faith is being willing to do it despite having no idea why God chooses the timing he does. Josh told me this morning, after walking some stuff to the dumpster by the "Red Cafe" that we are going to have a visitor at our home church here tomorrow morning.
-Rabbit trail- In the beginning of January a few of us families started doing a worship service together in our home. We decided against continuing to attend the Chapel on base for various reasons, but not after a LOT of prayer, wise council and discussion about our motives. God has blessed us immensely as we followed in obedience and our little gathering has seen great growth and we've talked many times about how blessed we feel about the truth being taught and the personal spiritual growth each of us has experienced since taking that leap of faith and doing church at home. -End of rabbit trail -
Continued with our visitor to church tomorrow: Josh was stopped by an older woman that was sitting out front of the red cafe. She asked if we do church on Sundays and said she, each Sunday, hears us in here when she is sitting and drinking her coffee. Josh said yes and she asked what denomination we are. He told her we are mostly non-denominational, evangelical Christians. He said she proclaimed with relief, "oh GOOD! Can I come tomorrow?!" I tried to not cry, but trying to not cry lately has proved futile. During transition I tend to cry about most things. He looked up from what he was doing at the stove and saw my red streaked face and chuckled the familiar way he does when he sees I'm crying. With a gentle tone he asked, "Honey, what's wrong?" "I don't understand God's timing, that's what" But it's not a problem. It's just reality. I've been studying Ecclesiastes for the past couple of weeks. I've only made it through the first few chapters because I find myself reading and re reading the same things in order to understand what Solomon was getting at. I started reading it when I was searching for Biblical truth about spending precious time doing the things that I love; building, making, creating. I have felt with each move that I come dangerously close to busying myself with projects to keep from processing the upheaval that is happening. They act as a distraction. Partly I do them because I know they won't get done if I don't just buckle down and do it. I recognized it when we moved from Florida, and saw it sooner this time around. Solomon talks a lot about vanity, toil and evil under the sun. I don't want my toil to fall into the category of evil under the sun. I have a lot left to read and study before I totally understand what he is talking about in Ecclesiastes, but it's already blessed me tremendously as I work through getting us ready to uproot and move to our next season of life. What a wise man he was. Solomon addresses in chpt 3:11,14,15 and chpt 8:17 that man cannot know God's timing, that man cannot know what God knows from beginning to end. It brings tears to my eyes when I don't understand His timing, but I take great comfort in knowing that it's designed that way. Our human brains cannot know. They aren't meant to know, which only makes our faith and trust all the more beautiful.
I don't understand why God designed it that just now we would run into this lady who has been church-body-less for over 20 years on the island. She's so eager for fellowship with believers. She so eager to be fed the Word and for worship. Why not 6 months ago so that she could grow with the rest of us? But it's a beautiful thing, His timing. He truly does work in mysterious ways and a beautiful example of that that instantly came to mind as I stood leaning against the kitchen counter with my tear streaked face is a story Manuela told me yesterday when we were on our way to Angra for lunch.
MANUELA'S STORY: Manuela's grandfather was a wealthy, hard working, family loving farmer. Looking at her family today one would have no idea that she comes from great amounts of money, but she does. The story of how he toiled years to secure a financially secure future is a beautiful picture of a father's love for his bride and their children, but it ends tragically with the marriage and divorce of Manuela's parents who had three little girls together. Her father was severely abusive to her mother and threatened her entire inheritance out of her soon after her father died. While she sat at the table holding the youngest of their three daughters, who was only one year old at the time, Manuela's mom was threatened by her husband who was pouring boiling water down her bare arm from a kettle he had pulled off the stove. She signed away her father's entire inheritance to the man that had held her a knife point and beat on her for years. And just like that, it was gone. Manuela, her mother and sisters and grandma fled to Terceira to escape the mad man. Her mother remarried only to find that her husband was just after the money he thought she still had. They had two little boys together before he decided to leave her after finding out she was poor. Manuela dropped out of school at the age of 13 to raise her half brothers so her mother could find work to feed the family. A childhood full of nightmarish memories of her dad and confusing pain about why life was the way it was.
Manuela married and had a daughter, but it soon became painfully obvious that her husband was not at all interested in being a husband, father or provider. He abandoned his wife and 1 year old daughter and spend years "working" in Lisbon where his parents and siblings lived. Before Manuela realized his true heart, she had been working diligently to pay all the families bills so that his work money could go solely to saving to buy a new house that he'd promised her they'd find when he came back from Lisbon. There was a lot of confusion and pain in the surrounding years before Manuela asked him to leave the home for good. In the meantime she had taken in a baby that she'd happened upon while visiting a family from her church that had stopped coming. Her job at the church at the time was to visit families who'd stopped coming to ensure they were ok and invite them back. She said she walked in and the state that the house was in left her breathless. 3 month old Liliana was laying on the couch sucking a chunk of bread she'd been given. She was clearly undernourashed and unclean. After some unfruitful conversation with her mother, Manuela sat down and held Liana. She asked her mother if she might take her home for the weekend to care for her, to give the mom a relief from the baby. The mother enthusiastically agreed and this continued for the next 9 months. Manuela took the baby back at the end of each weekend and said the older Liana got, the harder she cried when Manuela left her at her mother's house. Near Liana's first birthday the mother asked Manuela why she kept bring the baby back. She said she had no interest in having her and that Manuela should just keep her. So she did. Through the next few years and a long adoption process, Liana became Manuela's and Manuela loves her fiercely, just as she loves Lisa, her biological daughter. Manuela is also raising her nephew, the son of one of her half brothers. She began caring for him when he was just a few months old and eventually his parents, like Liana's, decided they had no interest in the little boy. He's lived with her permanently since he was about 3 years old. I've known the stories about Liana and Maurcio for a long while now, but I didn't know Manuela's childhood story in depth until she shared it with me during our drive yesterday. I grieved with her as she, pained, told me the story. I drove on for a while thinking of all the confusion and pain and loss and then it struck me. I've read of this so many times in Ecclesiastes; this very scenerio! And I was struck with the realization that had it not been for Manuela's completely dysfunctional father, she wouldn't have ended up on this island. How different Manuela's life would be! She could be living, financially secure in the old family home in Sao George, living a life vastly different from the one she has experienced here searching desperately for jobs just to provide food for her children. If she hadn't moved here, she wouldn't have married who she married and she wouldn't have Lisa. She agreed that Lisa alone is worth all the pain. And then we talked about if they hadn't moved here her two brothers wouldn't exist, so Mauricio would never have been born. And then in a moment of awe I looked at Manuela, yes, while I was driving, and said, "You saved Liana's life!" She had known that. I knew that. Liana knew that! But if it weren't for her broken earthly father, Liana wouldn't have been rescued by Manuela! The Lord knows these things!
Why the timing?! Why the pain and anguish and heartache and despair! Sometimes we won't know. Sometimes it won't be revealed to us, but sometimes it will, like it had been for Manuela. She's able to look at a lifetime of pain and see God's beautifully redemptive sovereignty. He used her past to rescue a precious baby girl from a life of pain, dysfunction, abuse and neglect. Manuela has told me of Liana's biological family and they continued dysfunction they live in and the incredible pain they experience because of their choices, and the pain their children deal with. Liliana was spared. She was rescued, through God's beautifully mastered design by a woman who pours herself endlessly into others. She was rescued by a mother who has worked diligently her entire life to ensure that her daughters can be educated and go to college, to break the cycle of poverty in the family. She was rescued by a Creator's plan. Her Creator knew the timing for everything. He knew from beginning to end.
He knows. He knows the beginning and the end and we aren't designed to know. We are designed to long for Him. We are designed to trust and desire Him above all else. Not knowing his timing can be discouraging and frustrating and scary at times, but OH the beauty in trusting!
Thank you, Manuela for your beautiful friendship. Thank you for letting me share this part of your story. Thank you for teaching so much, unintentionally, about how to be selfless for my children and look for their needs always before my own. What a wonderful example you are of that selfless love.
