Peaches and Cards

We sat on a bench in the middle of the compound. The concrete paths leading through the gardens slip under our swinging feet and splitting in two directions, on opposite sides of the property, stop at the steps the two homes. One home is for elderly women who are mentally handicapped, the other for "just" elderly women. We came bearing peaches and cards we had spent the morning making. Wishing I was more "spiritual", I wished I wasn't wishing not to be there as we walked through the putrid halls that afternoon. We had passed out all the fruit and cards we had in the homes and now sat, waiting for everyone else to finish doling out their supplies. Continual high pitched shrieks came from the home on our left. One of the ladies had been in a car accident years ago and permanent brain damage was accompanied by the continuing nightmare of her reliving the accident over, and over again.
Across from us, a sweet lady wearing a pink, fluffy robe is smiling at us. She only speaks Hungarian though, so we just smile and nod back.
I am sitting with my little, Romanian friend from the group homes. He is thirteen.
He knows a few words of her language, so as we speak, he offers them every now and then and she smiles even bigger at him.
"Why does no one want her? Look at her."
We were.
"See, she is nice old lady. There is nothing wrong with her..."
Screams from the home for the handicapped echoed over the compound.
"...you know, brain."
"I don't understand these people. If you have family, a mother, why you stick her here to die alone? Why you never come to visit her? Why, if you have mother, you not keep her?"
We continued to observe her as she happily munched her peach.
"And her.."
The screams have grown louder.
"What was the accident for? Yes, God must have had plan for her life. It was to die here?"
He gestured to the home.
Gulp.
What the heck. How am I supposed to respond to that?? I have no answers. None.
He is still talking. Talking about his friend from his home who hit his head. If he was brain damaged, he would end up in a home like this, eventually. Talking about peoples brains. He demonstrates a healthy brain by a fist, and a damaged one by a flat hand with spread fingers. If his friend's brain had been like this, a spread hand, he would be here.
Well, not here. But you know. In one for men.
Yup. I wanted to say, believe me. Walking through the halls, I thought of my kids that had been on my teams at camp. My special needs kids. The ones that will not be able to live alone. The ones who have no future outside of...this. God must have had a plan for them... Was it this? Withering away in some railed bed, staring at some white wall, until death slips in and slips his chilled fingers over their decimated, weary bodies?
I had seen the beginning at the baby hospital. The babies that would grow up, dependent on the state, maybe even go to a christian camp, and then die here. Those babies grow up. And they are here.
Gah. I don't know.
So I tell him that.
"I don't know. All I know is that God is somehow still perfectly good. And that the world is permanently messed up."
I winced inwardly at how my answer seemed to ring with insufficiency in light of the heaviness of our talk. But I had nothing else to offer. And no matter how overwhelming the fallenness of man seems, sin, and all of creation which "groans together", there isn't a better answer. I know He is it.
And I pray for a heavenly perspective. I pray that He overwhelms me with the peace of His sufficiency.
But I know that the closer I see, the more that the placating layers of the worlds lies are peeled back, and when finally, the nakedness of the decimation of sin (my own included) is in front of me, God, in all of His holiness, all of His goodness, in all of His perfectness, stepping down to extend salvation to us...
my heart bows before Him at a loss for words.