A Whole World in One Room

Yesterday we went to visit Alisson and her family.

Meeting Alisson (and showing her pictures on our iphone)

 With every visit, every ministry day since we got back from furlough, I am overwhelmed with the world that God is showing me. Being a missionary to Ecuador for years, you think you know poverty. You think you know pain and suffering. You think you know hopelessness. But all of these things exist in different degrees for different people, and God is peeling back the layers, showing me that it goes deeper and deeper. It´s like I´m standing at the threshold of more pain, sadness, need, poverty, and desperation than I have ever known, and God is issuing an invitation: Will you come in? Will you enter into their world?

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. Revelation 3:20

This is the very heart of the gospel. God saw our miserable state, and he decided to enter into it. Even now, His invitation to us is simply to open the door to our world. If we open the door, He will come in, and He will join us there. He won´t just pass by. He won´t say a quick ¨hello¨ and be on His way. He will come in and fellowship with us. He will become a part of whatever life we have. 

When Alisson´s family opened the door to their world, I didn´t realize that it would be one little room.We went to pick out a little toy to give to Alisson before we went to meet her. We talked about what she might want. We almost got her some play dishes and food, before deciding she was likely to already have those kinds of toys, and getting her a little play jewelry set instead. I don´t know what I was worried about. There were no toys in the room.

Alisson playing with her new toy

This family´s whole world fit into one tiny room. Two beds, a dresser with a small TV, a stove (which also serves as an end-table when not in use, while the oven is the bookshelf for Alisson´s brother, Alexander´s school books), and an unplugged refrigerator (unplugged because they had no food, and the refrigerator uses electricity, which costs money that they don´t have). 

They are a small family living in a tiny house at the top of the city of Ibarra, where neighbors are scarce, and the world could just forget that these people, and their one-room world, even exist. But I can´t forget, because they opened the door and invited me in. Into their world.

Alisson´s house

I can´t stop seeing their one-room home in my mind, every time I close my eyes. I can´t stop seeing Alisson´s dad, Edison, getting out of his wheelchair and onto the bed for a family picture, his catheter an obvious reminder of how drastically his life has changed. I can´t stop seeing the tired smile on Alisson´s mother, Elena´s face as she tries to make the best of an impossible situation. And I can´t stop seeing Alisson´s beautiful, enormous smile and chemo-short black hair.

Alisson´s smile

Alisson and her mother were stranded in Quito for three days because they didn´t have the $3 for bus fare back to their hometown. When we found out, we sent one of our team members to find them and give them money to get home, but they travel to Quito every week to get chemo and transfusions for Alisson. They get lunch at the local homeless shelter every day. But still, they smile.

As we tried to encourage them with the Word of God, and our own words of kindness and love, Elena told me: ¨I only turned away from God once since I became a Christian, when I found out about my daughter´s illness. I didn´t want to hear anything about God. I was so angry. I lost my first baby when she was two months old, and I just couldn´t imagine losing another child.¨ 

One child in heaven. Another with leukemia. A husband left paralyzed after an accident while working on their property. Lunches at homeless shelters. Stranded without even $3 for a bus. A whole world in a one-room house.

And as I sit here in my three-bedroom apartment, that by American standards would be considered very small, I think how very big it is after all. We have no shortage of toys, clothes or food, and on days like today I think maybe we still have too much. I wonder why people like Alisson´s family can live in a one-room house with no money for food while I just ate two pieces of bread and two cups of coffee for dinner. And I think that no amount of sacrifice, work or service will ever be enough, because there will always be hundreds more like Alisson. 

I´ve realized that opening these doors and entering into these lives has opened a door in my heart that will never close. I can never go back to the way things were before, and I wouldn´t want to. I want to go deeper--deeper into the pain and the hurt and the poverty and the suffering and the sorrow. I want to shine the light of the gospel in dark places and bring hope to the hopeless. I want to pour out every last ounce of my strength for the One who poured out every last ounce of His life for me. And for Alisson. 

-Ashley Rodrick
Director, Revolution Infantil

Alisson´s family (including her grandmother)