Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Stretch Out Your Skin: part 2

Dirty, desolate Benji sat outside the gates and watched.

That malnourished, un-held little boy body did not have enough health or hope to think about what could happen if he went inside those gates.


 So dirty, desolate Benji sat outside the gates and watched.
 
All photos taken by my smokin' hott husband.
To keep up with his insta-awesome, follow chrisleeladd on instagram. 
He watched cooking mamas, smiling and singing. 


He watched the other dirty kids skipping inside the gates to have their hands washed by those smiling, singing mamas.


He watched cheeks and tummies filling with healthy food and unlimited affection.


He watched those full tummies and happy faces laugh, play and dance like children were made to do.


Dirty, desolate Benji has probably never had a smiling mama to wash away the dirt or to sing away the desolation. He lives with relatives, but he has no parents. He shares a living space inside a culture that feels no obligation to reach for you, touch you or sing over you if you are not their own. No matter how many baths he takes or how many people are around him, without being seen, reached for, touched, he will always be dirty, desolate Benji.

One day, somebody saw Benji and didn’t skip past him. He saw that, past the thick layer of dust on his skin, Benji was physically breaking from not being touched. He stopped at that gate entrance and looked inside of those desolate eyes and found almost nothing.

Meet Benji. Sweet, sweet Benji.
My husband’s voice still trembles when he tells the story of seeing Benji and knowing – knowing in that way where you know, know, know – in that way you wish you couldn’t know so well…

Benji was going to die.

Chris knew that was probably the last week that dirty, desolate Benji would sit outside the gates and watch. Benji was not starving to death, but he was dying the devastating death of being untouched and unreached for.

We are made to be held. To be touched. To need each other.
More than we need food and water, we need each other.
We need hope to fill us and hope to touch us.


Chris knew that Benji needed Hope’s hold to save his life, and Hope had sent a whole bunch of hands and holders from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to save Benji’s life. Chris asked… no, Chris told the team from Fellowship Church to make sure someone was always holding Benji.

No longer allowed to sit outside the gates and watch, dirty Benji was scooped up and held tight for a solid week by outrageous Louisiana love, covered in life-giving prayer, and his desolation was shamelessly smothered out by endless affection.

Benji no longer sits outside of the gate and watches. Doting and delighted Benji dashes inside, does his sweet, momentarily shy Benji thing, and just waits for love to scoop him up.
THIS IS BENJI!
Hope grabbed a hold of Benji. Hope’s name is Jesus.
Hope came from a husband and father who could see, and from a church in Lousiana armed with compassion and Truth .

Hope put on skin and stretched it out vulnerably on a cross.
He did the worst and promised we would do more than He could.
Hope overcome dirty desolation with skin that reached and stretched, and Hope told us to do that too. 

Hope gives us eyes to see, hearts that know, and hands that reach. Hope makes our skin stretch further than we understand.

Hope asked my husband and Louisiana to reach out their skin so heaven could hold Benji. The dirty work has already been done, and in this world full of desolation, all we have to do is stretch out our skin and let Hope hold.

As Chris and I pack up to go back to South Africa on Sunday, we want to thank you for reaching for us, holding us and hoping with us.


If you have Jesus, you bear Hope in your hold, and there’s great power and reach if we join hands, hearts and resources to do it together. We believe God is asking us to reach a little further and stretch a little wider this year.
Would you pray about extending Hope’s reach by becoming a monthly supporter to join in the work with us this year as we head back to South Africa?

Please email me for more info at kacy.ladd@childrenscup.org

Or click here to make a tax-deductible one-time donation or automated monthly giving. Just click "Support".

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Stretch Out Your Skin: part 1

I found her homeless, lost and scared in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike on Galveston Island in 2008. Ms. Armstead was 87-years old and the evidence of her long life had been washed, tossed and left for debris in one night’s windstorm. I met Ms. Armstead in a hot, humid, roach-infested hotel room, and she couldn’t find her son.

All she had in there with her was a Bible and a diamond bracelet. The bracelet was debris that had washed up with the hurricane floodwaters. She found it when she accidentally ran her shopping cart over it during her daily walk to the grocery store.

I visited Ms. Armstead often, holding her hands, wiping her tears, answering her phone calls, and finally making a few calls of my own. It wasn’t long before we started meeting in her new rental house – all it took was loading her up in my little Ford Ranger, calling every imaginable social service office on her behalf, locating her son, doing her grocery shopping, coordinating church and medical services, and signing her lease myself.  

Technically, I was her crisis counselor…
I might have stretched the boundaries of that slightly. She became a family member. I remember the day my cousins bought her a dining room table, and the day we picked up couches for her and decorated her house. I remember bringing my grandma, mom and sister to visit her, swapping stories and photos, and the day she anointed my sister and my head with cooking oil - and we felt equally blessed and worried about breaking out.

She lost everything except her faith. The less she had on this earth, the more she reached for God.

She would stay up all night on some nights crying out for the brokenness of her community. I can still hear her shaky little 87-year old voice, weeping and praying “the blood of the lamb” with a toothless mouth over me and every single person who walked by her house.

She always, always, always prayed for me. She prayed fervently about my wedding day, and she dreamt prophetically about it for the year and a half I spent working with her.

At the end of 2009, when I told her I was leaving for South Africa, she wept with my grandma. She sent me with her blessings, the blood of the lamb, and that diamond bracelet to wear on my wedding day.

In 2015, I wore that bracelet in South Africa on my wedding day. And walked down the aisle with two blessings greater than Ms. Armstead could have known she had prayed for.


My husband, Chris, and I drove by her home when we got to Texas. I didn’t expect Ms. Armstead to be alive anymore because our letters of correspondence ended a few years ago. I just wanted to bring that handsome answer to her prayers to see the place where the prayers were lifted and where the dreams of him were birthed.

A woman from her church was going to check on her house right as we drove by, and she told us Ms. Armstead is in a nursing home after a bad fall and would turn 94 the following week!

Days later, I walked into the room where she napped and cupped her enormous, age-softened hand in mine. The second she opened her eyes, she said my name as loud as her voice would allow, and she wept. She said, “You’re married. I knew it. I never stopped praying for you,” as I flipped through the wedding album and told her stories about Chris, Lifa and South Africa.

It was like we never missed a beat. She could barely speak; her skin has lost all elasticity and only loosely drapes her fragile bones; but she is still Ms. Armstead. She told me she couldn’t take care of herself anymore, and she just wanted to go home to Jesus. She was tormented with worry for the salvation of her granddaughter and great-granddaughter, and she just wanted to rest.

I held her hands, and I kissed her nose. I looked deeply into her tired eyes, and I spoke loud and clear, “You’ve lived a good life, Ms. Armstead. You’ve done well, and you’ve done your part. You can rest now.”



I made a promise to her that I would take on the burden of praying for her family members, and she could rest. I saw relief wash over her glassy, gray eyes. She said it would be our last time to see each other, and she blessed me and choked up with her hands on mine. She said, “Just tell people about Jesus, baby.”

I kissed her forehead over and over again.
It was the softest skin I’ve ever felt.
Thread-bare by a life well lived.
Skin stretched thin by a 94-year pilgrimage of lamenting for the lost, inhabiting His Word, and reaching and reaching and reaching for heaven.

I prayed for her and told her that I am spending my life with a husband who looks, sounds, walks and talks just like Jesus. I told her we will spend our lives telling the world about Jesus and every prayer she prayed for me was answered. The storm that seemed to sink it all brought about prayers that would literally reach the nations and bejeweled the arm of this happy bride in the process.

As she held my hands in her soft, life-stretched-thin hands and told me, “Just tell people about Jesus, baby” she put her strong mantle on my family and me. I gave her permission to rest, and told her we would pick up the work from here.

I remembered the passage of promise for the desolate woman that told her to increase her space because her legacy would stretch far and wide. “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide.” The literal translation for that passage, written in a time of animal skin tent dwellings, is “stretch out your skin”.

Ms. Armstead has stretched out her skin and increased the inhabitants of the Kingdom of God. She made every one of those 94 years count.

So we pick up the work from here, and we remind each other:

Stretch our your skin, and make it count.
As long as you have skin to stretch, make it count.
Because when you reach, when you spend you skin on what will still matter when your skin won’t stretch anymore, it counts.

When Ms. Armstead closes her eyes for the last time on this earth, after she’s shed that final tear and she leaves that old, tired, stretched out skin, we will continue, on the wings of her prayers to the ends of the earth. And even greater than that, her Bridegroom will put a shiny diamond bracelet on her arm, kiss her brand new skin, and say, “Well done, my beautiful bride. You told people about Jesus, baby.”

From Isaiah 54:
“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes.
For you will spread out to the right and to the left; your descendants will dispossess nations and settle in their desolate cities…” 
“Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted, I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise, ayour foundations with lapis lazuli.
I will make your battlements of rubies, your gates of sparkling jewels, and all your walls of precious stones.
All your children will be taught by the Lord, and great will be their peace.”


Ps: It feels good to be BACK ON THE BLOG. A new year of great things ahead! Stay tuned for more changes, a new website, and the part 2 installment about a boy named Benji.