A week ago today, last Friday at our single mom’s Bible study group there was a new face. Raiane introduced her best friend Andrielly. Best friends since they were kids. Andrielly sat next to me for about the first half of the study. Then she had to step outside. She was very pregnant. Our bible studies are sometimes a little chaotic, anywhere from a half a dozen or more than a dozen kids, ranging in age from 1 and a half to twelve coming and going and various needs for their moms.
Raiane stood in the doorway with Andrielly, massaging her shoulders. Everything seemed all right. The study was on a new book I had decided to begin reading to the moms. Max Lucado’s “Experiencing the Heart of Jesus”. In the beginning Max reminds us that, even though when we look at a crowd of people, and it’s just a crowd to us, our Father knows every single person. Every single name. Engraved on his hand (Isaiah 49:16).
These moms never saw their names on the honor roll at school, or were picked to play girls’s soccer (if the school even had a soccer field), or were called on by the teacher because she knew they would have the right answer. Their names, if they came up, were for other reasons. They were “those” girls…
You could have heard a pin drop as we read and and re-read that passage. Your name Raiane, your name Joice, your name Andrielly, written on your Father’s hand…
Nobody knew that Andrielly would start having terrible pains Saturday. That Sunday at the little neighborhood maternity ward they would have to do an emergency C-section. That the kind of pre-natal care a mom from the favela has access to would not discover she had gestational diabetes until it was too late. Nobody knew that afternoon that her baby would be stillborn. Nobody knew…
At the burial service I shared about Jesus’ delay in getting to Bethany. And Martha’s question, like any sister’s or mother’s question. Why? That even though we may not ever know the answer here, He does. And some day we will too. And that Apollo Matheus’s name had already been written on his Father’s hand. The same hand that is holding him now.
Adeus from family and friends of Apollo Matheus
This afternoon I was reading back over that passage. Preparing for a message for our Church in the Street ministry tonight. And I saw something I hadn’t seen before. Verse 15.
“Can a mother forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!.
Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands…”
Isaiah 49:15-16
I sent those to Andrielly. I said I knew she would never forget Apollo Matheus. But what if, what if… though we didn’t know, couldn’t know… Apollo Matheus’s Father knew and He wanted Andrielly to know that He knew, that as sure as his name was engraved on the Father’s hand, the same Father held her name there as well.
Andrielly wrote back and said she had been thinking a lot about that passage. She said she is confident the Lord will give her wisdom and comfort.
Pray for Andrielly. Pray for Raiane as she comforts her childhood friend, as she encourages her to get to know the Lord who writes our name on his hand.