One Heart at a Time

by Delilah

  Pay them no mind. Thank them for their concern and assure them that very few volunteers are actually eaten by a python or a crocodile and that you will keep your hands and your feet in the boat when going through piranha-infested water. Be gracious and kind, but be firm in your resolve to use whatever talents and skills you have to reach out and change the world. Sooner or later they will realize you are not going to stop on your fierce approach to unconditional love, and they will accept your plans and let you fly.

  I was mostly silent about adopting Willette and Mercy, because I didn’t want to hear another person tell me I shouldn’t, nor did I want to see one more eye roll. And no matter how many times I’ve been beaten up by the stigma of being a woman in radio, fired, and told no, I’ve stuck to my guns and followed my dream. That’s how I’ve ended up where I am today. Hardheadedness, perseverance, luck, and pluck pay off!

  In a similar way, I think my daughter Blessing knew I was her mother when we first met at the refugee camp, and though she didn’t have many words to express it, she had a fierce grip and determination that wouldn’t let me go.

  So what is it you want to do? Who do you want to be? Maybe it isn’t a career-related goal, but a more personal thing you aspire to. Follow that whisper in your heart, because likely that’s God planting a purpose you have yet to uncover. And whatever you do, know this: you will come against opposition whenever you align yourself with God’s plan, the naysayers and voices of reason to not do something. But if it’s your dream and your purpose to do something and you keep a firm grip on it, God will make a way for it…

  CHAPTER 4:

  AN OBEDIENT HEART

  “I’m going back to the camp,” I told my business partner, Kraig, on the phone from my hotel room in Ghana.

  “No, you’re not,” he replied from a meeting he was attending with Point Hope board members in Accra. “It’s getting late.”

  I told him that didn’t matter. Something was calling me back to Buduburam, and I had to go.

  “Why would you consider going back? It’s going to be dark soon,” he insisted.

  “Because God told me to go,” I said.

  With that he knew there was no arguing—my mind was made up.

  I was exhausted from a busy day of tending to sick moms, pregnant teens, starving babies, abandoned orphans, and demanding men in sweltering heat. At the end of the day, I had been sitting by the pool at our hotel, playing with my two newly adopted daughters, Angel and Blessing, when I suddenly felt the urge to go back to camp. No, not an urge—an insistence. Like a nagging feeling that builds and builds, weighing on your heart until you know it is something you have to do.

  I jumped up, grabbed the girls, and headed back to our room to dress and let Kraig know.

  Every time I go to Ghana, I try to bring others with me. This trip, I was with my girlfriend Debbie Sundberg and her husband, Brian, who were friends of mine from my rural community in Washington. Brian was a landscape architect who had come to Ghana to help with our organic gardens, and Debbie was a fabulous seamstress who was teaching women job skills that would keep them from having to walk the streets for money.

  When I got off the phone with Kraig, I told Debbie I was leaving and asked if she would watch the children. “I’m going with you,” she said, so we left my two young, newly adopted daughters with Brian.

  There was good reason for Kraig to be concerned for our well-being… Ghana is near the equator. When it gets dark, it gets dark almost instantly. It goes from being absolutely sunny and bright to total darkness in a matter of minutes. And as quickly as the blue-black darkness descends upon West Africa, so does the mood in the camp.

  While I never felt unsafe walking around the 128 acres that made up Buduburam during the day, at night it was a completely different environment. Gone were the faces of the teenage mothers I knew and recognized, and the babies I fed and cared for during the day were now all sleeping on straw mats strewn about the floors of mud huts and cinder-block shacks. At night, the camp was pitch-dark, but it came alive with a pulsing, throbbing, demanding energy as throngs of teenagers hung out and danced and laughed in the shadows. It was easy to see why the average birthing age in the camp was only fifteen. The cacophony of the sound was deafening. People shouting to be heard in two or three African languages over distorted native music infused with the odd mix of Kenny Rogers, Madonna, James Taylor, and Lionel Richie. Generally, when the obruni—white woman—approached, they quieted down, but once I traveled on a few steps, they went back to talking among themselves in their native tongues and dancing to music that blared over speakers that had been blown out years before.

  It really wasn’t the dancing, shouting teenagers, nor the drunken brawls that Kraig was worried about, though. His concern was over the bodies that had been found a few days earlier, stabbed and quartered and left on people’s doorsteps. Witchcraft, juju, spells, and human sacrifices were usually only spoken about in whispers and hushed tones but sometimes made it into the local newspaper.

  Swallowing any fear, Debbie and I found a taxi and bounced along the rutted red roads to the camp. The ride was jarring and rough, and I’m prone to car sickness. Thankfully I managed to make it without throwing up.

  Two of my security guard friends at the front gate rushed to meet us. They were frantic.

  “We knew you would come back, Mama Delilah!” Beyan exclaimed.

  “How did you know I was coming back? I didn’t call anyone.”

  “Because,” Beyan replied, “we prayed. We prayed you would come back and now you have.”

  From a dusty, overcrowded, throbbing refugee camp, a request had been sent into the universe, and back at a comfortable hotel, my heart had heard. My heart had heard it so loudly I could not shut my ears nor refuse the urging in my spirit!

  “Why? Why did you pray?”

  The men hurried into a nearby hut and brought out a tiny, limp baby. He was so small, maybe ten or twelve pounds, and he fit in Beyan’s hands like a naked rag doll. His head was flopped back, and his eyes were glazed over. He looked like he was dead.

  They tried to hand the lifeless baby to me, and I startled.

  “This is the son of one of the guards,” Fidel explained. “The mother is sick. She has a tumor in her stomach and her milk dried up, and no one has any money to buy formula.”

  The child had been left with a neighbor while the mother waited at the clinic for treatment. He’d only had water, no milk, for the past few days, and he was dying. They had taken him to the camp clinic and the doctor tried to put an IV in, but his tiny veins were too small and he was too dehydrated. They were told to take him home to die with his father. That was when my friends began to pray, and within an hour I was back at the camp.

  “But I am not a doctor or a nurse,” I insisted.

  “No, you are Mama Delilah,” Beyan said, as if that gave me magical healing powers. I almost chuckled thinking of my biological daughter back at home in the US, chronically ill with an autoimmune disorder and constantly in the hospital. How I wished I had the gift of healing.

  My exhaustion fled, and I was suddenly energized. I took the tiny, lifeless infant into my arms. He took raspy, faint breaths that seemed to require all of his body’s energy. I prayed. Debbie prayed. We all prayed. His big glassy eyes rolled back in his head then fluttered closed.

  Suddenly I remembered a woman I had cared for earlier in the day, a young mother who was at the clinic. Her baby girl suffered from malaria and was too weak to nurse. As a result, the mother’s breast had become inflamed with mastitis. I spent a bit of time with her, showing her how to express the milk by hand to relieve the pressure, how to put warm rags on her engorged breasts to reduce the swelling. She was only a few yards away from where we were standing. I told Debbie my plan, and, clutching the baby, we ran to her.

  “We need to borrow your breast milk,” I explained when we located her. She looked shocked but agreed.

  We went through our bag of supplies and found rub
ber gloves, a syringe, and a water bottle. I took the cap off the bottled water while Debbie removed the needle from the syringe. I then asked the mother to express a tiny bit of milk into the bottle cap. She did.

  We hesitated a moment, knowing that the mother should have been tested for HIV before we used her milk, but we had no time to spare and no other options available. Debbie drew the milk up into the needle-less syringe and placed it carefully into the dying baby’s mouth, slowly dripping the milk into his throat. We prayed out loud the entire time. We were afraid he would aspirate on the liquid, so we didn’t force it, just gently offered it drop by drop. Again the young nursing mama filled the little bottle cap. Again Debbie administered the drip, drip, drip…

  The baby’s raspy breathing was a rattle that shook his featherlight body and reminded me of my mom as she lay in her bed dying from brain cancer. His limbs were limp, his tongue was extended, and his lips were dark blue, almost black. The heaviness of his death rattle weighed more than that of his tiny spirit, it seemed.

  A third capful and more prayers were offered—prayers in English and in Twi, in Ashanti and in the Liberian tribal tongues. Prayers for healing and prayers for life.

  Suddenly, his head began to move. He flickered his eyes and briefly opened them. We prayed louder, and I pressed my ear to his tiny chest and listened for a heartbeat.

  Fidel and Beyan had found Clarence, the father of the dying child, and brought him to us. He joined us in prayer and watched as the son he had said goodbye to an hour earlier began to move. His eyes, which had been rolled back, came forward and started to look around. The baby started breathing easier, and after what seemed like an eternity, he cried. We cried. We all cried and praised the Lord and cried some more!

  One of the guards ran and got Tambor, the doctor who had tried to treat the child then sent him home to die with his family. Tambor was amazed and kept saying, “By God’s grace he lives! This cannot be the same baby I saw earlier! By God’s grace he lives!”

  Tambor led us to the mother, Bendu, who was almost as thin as her infant son. She was feverish and sweating, her beautiful face racked with pain. She was lying nearly naked on a filthy, unmade bed on the floor of the deplorable clinic, wrapped in a length of dirty batik and wearing a soiled shirt. Her stomach was swollen and hard and hot to the touch.

  West Africa has a pay-as-you-go medical system. As war refugees, Bendu and her family had the privilege of being seen at the clinic in the refugee camp, and the doctors and nurses did the best that they could with such limited resources, but she could not be treated in the Ghanaian hospitals unless she could pay for the services. So she was at the clinic, dying of a mass that had become infected after she gave birth a few months before.

  She was too weak to stand but cried tears of joy when she saw her son moving and breathing, his eyes bright once again.

  “Take him,” she begged. “Take him with you.”

  This wasn’t the first time a mother had begged me to take her child, but usually it was in the hopes that if I took their child, I would care for them and send them money in exchange. But Bendu’s expression and pleading were something entirely different. She knew she could not care for her baby, and she somehow knew I would not let the tiny infant die.

  Tambor found someone to sell us formula and a baby bottle. I took the infant to a bench to continue feeding him and sat down to rest.

  What had just happened?

  A moment later, the mother who had donated the breast milk sat down beside me. Her baby had gotten medicine for her malaria and was now nursing once again.

  We sat there in silence together, she with her daughter and me with the emaciated boy with the bright eyes. She was young and thin, and her skin was ebony. I was in my late forties, and my ample flesh was ivory. Two mamas who spoke entirely different languages, but who shared the universal language of motherhood.

  As I sat there in the moonlight, I marveled.

  How God had taken a girl from the farms of Oregon, an uneducated woman whose great grandfather on her mama’s side had in all probability been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and whose father had disowned her for marrying a black man in 1982, and made her “Mama Delilah” to an entire village of African refugees?

  I didn’t grasp it then. I still don’t.

  I sat on that bench and wondered, why me? Maybe in that moment, I did not grasp it, but what I did grasp and have always known is that I could try to change the world for good, even if by one heart at a time.

  I love to pray. About everything. I pray for parking spots at the mall during the holidays, for planes to be held when I’m running late, for all the eggs to hatch when my chickens are sitting on a clutch, and I pray for my children to be healed of chronic and terminal illnesses.

  When I begged God to spare my son Sammy’s young life, to heal him, His answer was no. My anger and rage burned. My sorrow nearly swallowed me alive. And then I prayed for God to lift my pain enough for me to be able to breathe. In time, I realized that Sammy hurt. Every single day of his life, the sickle cell anemia caused him immense pain. I had to release my rage and accept God’s will for my son, though I vehemently disagreed.

  One of my favorite writers, C. S. Lewis, was quoted as saying, “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time—waking and sleeping. Prayer doesn’t change God—it changes me.”

  I used to pray to change God’s mind, or rather, to convince the Lord to see things my way. Sometimes I still do, but not nearly as often as before. Now I usually pray to know God’s will in my life. I say “usually,” because let’s be honest, I still think God should see things my way sometimes… I’m only human.

  I pray when I’m happy; I try to notice details in the natural world and in the things man has created and say a simple thank-you when I take note of God’s handiwork. A sky painted orange and gold as the sun sets, the same sky blackened with powerful storm clouds that give rain to nurture my gardens… a pink rose, delicate with dew drops, the ridiculous noises my geese or miniature donkeys make… the smile in my daughter’s eyes when I rub her back or massage her shoulders, the rhythmic breathing of my stubborn son Zack, who all but shut me out during the day, then looked like my last-born baby, peaceful and sweet, when I would check in on him before going to bed at night. For all these things I try to thank my God, and each day I look for new gifts and miracles to be grateful for. I have taken tens of thousands of photographs of the flowers, fruits, animals, and settings of my farm, recording the minuscule miracles that delight my eyes. Each picture, a praise to God for His creative powers.

  For some, prayer is a tradition or a ritual that brings them peace and serenity, but for me it is life’s breath. Some use prayer or rosary beads, memorized words or chants or a set time during the day to help establish a prayer routine. Me, not so much…

  My deepest prayers are usually prayed when I’m outside enjoying the beauty of nature. It is in the quiet of the forest or sitting next to a stream that my mind is clear and I can meditate on God’s holiness and His word. To try to grasp that the One who created the heavens and earth desires to connect and communicate with me is both humbling and empowering. When the world shoots me down, when honors and awards I have worked hard for go to others, when lovers leave, friends disappoint, my own body betrays and pain is searing, the fact that the Almighty values me enough to invite me into his presence to converse and connect is proof that I am valuable, precious, and loved.

  The best time for me to pray? Anytime. Paul said, “Rejoice always. Pray continually.” (1 Thess. 5:16-17) I wake up praying, asking God to give me wisdom as I start my day. I ask Him for favor and protection over all I say and do. Before I open my eyes, I try to praise Him in my heart and thank Him for the many challenges I will face throughout the day. (And to give me strength not to throttle those who annoy me!) I have a tendency to think that just because my motives are good, I have a green light to plunge ahead on a given co
urse or project, and in doing so I have done more harm than good on more than one occasion. I need to pray for God to take the lead and let me know when and how far to go, and to give me the patience and wisdom to wait.

  I pray during the day, less formally than you would guess. When I’m on horseback, I can spend hours in prayer. Me, my horse Shadow, and God wandering through the forests or racing down the beach. If someone were listening, they would think I am mad the way I talk out loud to the Lord! I shout praises when I see something spectacular, like a bald eagle circling my farm. I know it’s looking for one of my chickens to steal, but I feel privileged to be able to see such a magnificent creature up close! I pray when my little kids are five minutes late getting home from school, and I pray when the older ones get behind the wheel of a car. I whisper prayers of protection when my son Isaiah and stepdaughter Rene are working as police officers, and prayers of gratitude when they go home after a twelve- or fifteen-hour shift.

  I fall asleep most nights praying. I don’t count sheep (at the present time I have three, however)—I count my blessings. I replay encounters that occurred during the day that I know were orchestrated by God.

  Prayer elevates me from bouts of depression, grounds me during bouts of hysteria. Prayer deepens my faith and allows me clarity when my world is muddled and confused. Prayer lifts me from the mundane into the sublime at times. When I recognize that there is nothing I can do to affect or alter the course of others who are hell-bent on destruction, prayer gives me serenity and peace.