She said it in the comments on my last post, “oh my heart aches for that little girl-you. i’m so glad God gave you him.”  I’m glad too, for the redemption.

This empathy ache, it comes from one who carries a cheery bundle on her hip, watches the other scoot around on plastic car and then says yes, I will be a surrogate mother to two more.  Two seeds sprouted from a mother whose well ran dry, capacity to parent served its last drop.

These souls, they mirror my own young life. When my aunt says, “She can live with me.”

A single teacher agrees to take her teenage niece in the second half of my third year of high school. Because the family my mother leaves me with, they decide it isn’t prudent to foster a girl without legal rights.

I sleep on a cot, next to her bed in the one bedroom apartment with the avocado carpet and plaid couch.  We croon Barry Manilow in the mirror of makeup, pick up taco salad after school, shop at JC Penney, practice driving in the Toyota Celica that becomes my first car.

The heart rests in the security of belonging to one who loves true. Spreads out it branches and roots deep in the waters of acceptance.

And yesterday, when a friend mentions that the nurse at the high school knows of many who live at home but suffer without proper care or necessities. Asks if we might help with the riches of what He gives .

My heart aches empathy, says yes, because I know this kind of poverty.

Aren’t we all surrogate mothers to the ones who walk long with the God sized ache to be loved and belong? To be conduits of Jesus that fill in the emptiness, the ache of poverty.

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?  

1 Corinthians 3:16

Writing for five minutes (maybe a few more) in community with Lisa Jo on the one word prompt: Ache.