Finding joy in immense poverty found here in the Philippines can be tough sometimes. The other day I was introduced to a twelve year old girl named Crystelle. a local pastor’s wife had met Crystelle a couple of days earlier at a feeding, noticed she looked malnourished, and followed her home to meet her family. Two days later, Andy (one of the guys on my team) and I were invited to take some groceries to the family and meet them. We parked the car outside of a gated community and walked through a hole in the fence into a squatter’s village. The further we walked back into this community, the worse the living conditions became. Crystelle’s house was close to the end of the village. She lived in a 10 by 10 room with her mother, baby brother, two younger siblings, a fourteen year old sister that spends her day at school, and a sixteen year old brother who is the size of an eight year old and functions at the level of a four year old. Her mother has ovarian cysts that are pushing up against her kidneys and back causing excruciating pain and her inability to use her legs. The father comes home only on the weekends and is usually very agitated and hard to get along with. They have no running water or toilet and no furniture. Water is collected at a well further back in the village. This twelve year old girl is now the main caregiver for her six family members, and she has stepped up to the challenge. She cooks, does laundry, takes care of the kids, and helps her mom move around and keeps her comfortable. She was a great host to us, smiling and laughing as we helped her get water from the well and walking us back and forth in and out of the village. The family does not have enough money for doctors to remove the cysts, and the mother’s lungs are not strong enough to survive the surgery anyways, so she has to just lay there in pain. We were able to pray with the family and brought a social worker to start a case for the kids to maybe be put in an orphanage, and a couple days later we brought them some more fire wood to cook with, but I still walked away wondering where the Joy of God was in this family’s story.
After struggling and praying about what I had just experienced, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Dewey, the local pastor whose wife introduced us to Crystelle. He said there are no doubt thousands of families that are in situations similar to Crystelle’s family, and even worse. But God chose this family to present to us and to help. Taking them food, firewood, and a social worker may help in the immediate future, but our prayers and exposing them to the Love of Christ bare fruit that is eternally helpful. He likened it to putting a drop in a bucket. Helping one family at a time may seem worthless when compared to the big picture, but, to Crystell’s family, our drop in the bucket that day was an outpouring flood of God’s Grace, Provision, and Love. When we offer help in the name of Jesus Christ, he takes our minimal efforts and multiplies the results into greatness. The Joy of God was found in the smiles on Crystell’s siblings faces, as well as her own, in the prayers of comfort and protection. The Joy of God was found in the drop at the bottom of the bucket.
