The gift of blessing

When I was 19 years old, my father's colleague secured a last-minute seat for me on a small United Nations plane heading from Nairobi to Goma, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). My assignment was to locate a ride from the Goma airport to the large Rwandan refugee camp on the shores of Lake Kivu. There, I would serve as French-English translator for a short-term team volunteering at a camp orphanage. I was home in Kenya for the summer after completing my freshman year at Wheaton College, and my parents had insured I wouldn't suffer any summer boredom by lining up a couple interesting opportunities for me. This was one of them.

The full story of my adventures getting to Goma and back to Kenya a week later, and the many ways God protected me despite the fact that I had no money, no means of communication, and nobody looking out for me, deserves a blog post of its own. The memory I'm sharing now comes from the days I spent at the refugee camp orphanage.

Rwandan refugee camp near Goma, Zaire in 1994
Wikipedia image

The entire refugee camp was a melange of blue UNHCR plastic, rock, and salvaged belongings, nestled between an active volcano and a once-beautiful lake that was now polluted with dead bodies and cholera. The short-term team and I stayed in small tents surrounding a larger tent complex that served as an orphanage. As I translated throughout the week, it became sadly clear that the orphanage was a bit of a scam operation to extract money from Westerners, and that most of the children there weren't even orphans (the short-term team returned to the United States with their idealism badly wounded). There was no question, though, that the children in the orphanage were victims, whether they were orphans or not. There was no way to know the depth of trauma they had endured, or what their future would be.

I spent hours with the orphanage babies and toddlers, who limply curled up into my arms, laying their heads on my chest. They were not interested in games or interaction, but simply wanted to be held. There was so little I could do for them, and nothing I could give them apart from the comfort of my person. I felt like a useless spectator, with no power to change anything. As the hopelessness of the children's situation and my own impotence pressed in on me, I realized that there was one thing I could do, small though it was. I could bless the children. I began to lay a hand on each child's head and murmur the blessing that Moses pronounced over the Israelites in his final message: "May the LORD bless you and keep you. May he make his face to shine upon you. May he be gracious to you. May he lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace." I said this over and over again, as the children melted ever closer against me. As I blessed the children, I pictured them nestled again God's chest the way they were nestled against mine, and I felt his love and tenderness for them so many times greater than my own. I didn't understand, but I chose to trust in God's care for them, and dared to speak his blessing over them.

When Luke and I married, we asked my grandfather to close our ceremony with the same blessing. At first, I suggested he just bless us as the newly married couple, but Luke's vision was that he open up his arms and bless everybody in attendance. My grandfather died soon afterwards in a car accident, and my memory of the benediction he gave us, and the joy and love in his voice, is indeed a blessing.

A few years later, I became a mother, and spent an exhausting first year attached to my son day and night. Finally, he began to sleep in his own crib, and eventually in his own room. Although I welcomed the opportunity to sleep through the night, it was a little scary to lapse into unconsciousness in a room entirely seperate from my son. It was a small letting go, a trusting that he'd be okay throughout the night even though I couldn't see him or immediately hear him, even though I was relaxing my watch and my protection as I slept.

And so I reached again for Moses' blessing. Before I went to bed each night, I put my hand on my sleeping son and whispered over him. "May the LORD bless you and keep you. May he make his face to shine upon you. May he be gracious to you. May he lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace." I felt my love and God's love surrounding my son, and I chose again to trust in God's care for Josiah, for that night and for his life.

I still visit each of my children every night right before I go to bed. I adjust their covers (or pull them back onto the bed if they're falling off), drink in their beautiful sleeping faces, bless them, and give them a final kiss. More often than not these days, my almost-14-year-old son is still awake in bed when I come in, but he's never yet objected. So I murmur the blessing under my breath while he gives me one last lingering hug. The nightly blessing ritual roots me every night in my love for my children, and reminds me of how they are held in God's arms.

There are few things sweeter than sleeping children.

When Josiah was born, a favorite baby shower gift was "Love You Forever" by Robert Munsch. In this picture book, a mother sings the same song of love and affection over her son every night as he grows older. Even when he's a grown man, she drives across town, enters his bedroom room via ladder, and rocks him while she sings. Honestly, I thought this book was kind of creepy when I first read it. The picture of the mom rocking her grown son just didn't work for me.

"Love You Forever" is still not my favorite book, but I feel differently about it now. I found that before he wrote the book, Munsch made up and sang that song over and over as a way to process his grief over two stillborn babies. I see the song as a parent's blessing, and I understand the fictional mother's deep desire to want to keep on blessing her son every day of his life. If my son ever protests me coming into his room at night, I won't pull the ladder out of the garage and climb in his bedroom window. But I'll probably still bless him from outside his bedroom door.