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The boy, about eight years old, was strapped to a board. He couldn’t move.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t move because he was strapped to the board, but because he was paralyzed from the neck down. The board was just how the resource-strapped care facility could manage.
The home, a care facility for children with challenges, was in a poor part of Capetown, South Africa. Naomi was still figuring out what to do with her humanitarian journey, and the little boy in front of her poked her in the soft underbelly of her own discomfort.
That discomfort, she realized, wasn’t because the children made her uncomfortable. They didn’t. It was because she wasn’t sure what to do for them, feeling terribly inadequate. She was afraid of going up to them and wounding them by overestimating their ability. Or underestimating their ability. She didn’t know what to do.
Naomi approached the boy on the board. A woman at the home explained that he’d been dropped on his head by a parent who was drunk. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He couldn’t communicate at all.
Not knowing what else to do, Naomi simply knelt down, reached out, and started to stroke his forehead.
Slowly his eyelids began to flutter. Then tears began to stream down his face. Time stood still.
Naomi heard someone said that it was time to go. She found herself trapped, not knowing how to get up and leave. She pulled her hand back, and his eyes opened, darting over to her as if to ask why she’d stopped.
Naomi couldn’t get his face out of her head. That night she cried herself to sleep. She cried because he was strapped to a board; she cried because she had to take her hand away from his face; she cried because she’d witnessed something that transcended language and limitation yet, powerfully, was the very language of humanity.
Consider this.
If I only had a broken leg, you wouldn't think of me as less human. You would, however, understand that my life is different than most people. It would be easy to see past the brokenness.
Every day, though, we talk to people whose brokenness isn't as obvious as a broken leg...or being completely paralyzed and strapped to a board. They're our customers, our co-workers, our neighbors. And if we see them like Naomi saw the boy on the board, we'd see that every single one of them is broken somewhere including, if not especially, the heart.
We often hear that God is love, and that is true. But that doesn't mean he didn't have harsh words, he did. For the self-righteous. For those who persist in playing God. For those who refused to repair their relationship with him. But that's not his ultimate desire.
600 years before Jesus the prophet Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would bring perfect justice to those people while at the same time saying "a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench."(1)
In contrast with His response to the self-righteous, Jesus went out of his way to connect with the broken — the sick, the children, the widows, the humble.
He still does.
Jesus sees right through our Instagram selfies and good deeds and our Sunday clothes. He sees right through to our brokenness, that something that can only be healed when we accept His offer to do so.
And He's reaching out His hand to touch your cheek and stare into your eyes.
It's the ultimate love language of humanity, but it's more than that, too. It's the love language of God Himself.
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Source: Naomi Zacharias here.
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Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in communications, an award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. A five-time entrepreneur and certified John Maxwell Team leadership coach, his latest endeavor is For The Hope, a daily Bible and apologetics podcast and training company equipping on-the-go professionals with confidence and courage for marketplace relationships. On Twitter can follow him @RogerCourville and/or his podcast @JoinForTheHope, or get all updates by email subscription at www.forthehope.org.