“Hello? This is Dakota Baptist Church.”
“Sarahcanyoubringmeapop??”
One of my responsibilities the summer I was seventeen was to answer the church phone. The caller was a twelve year old girl. She spoke so quickly that all her words ran together, and we had the same conversation everyday.
“Well, where are you?”
“Atmyhouse.”
“Where’s your house?”
“Nexttomygrandmother’s!”
Needless to say, it took me a long time to figure out where the girl lived, but when I did, I brought a cherry coke. Her voice was gravelly, and she was different from other children. I never knew who her family was or even if she went to school.
She had no beauty or attraction that demanded anyone’s attention.
When William Tyndale first translated the Bible into English, he needed a word for something so attractive that it demanded your gaze and attention and so timely that it flourished where it was.
He coined the adjective beautiful.
No one beholding this girl ever called her beautiful, and as she aged, she drifted even farther from the definition of perfect beauty.
When I moved permanently to my town, I saw her fairly frequently. She still asked me for a pop, and sometimes, I would take her one. Once, when I went to visit at the local jail, she was there. Once, when I took food to the house that everyone recognized as the center of prostitution in our community, she was there. Many times, she would come as a chaperone with children to Sunday School. She bounced around and never seemed to belong anywhere.
In some ways, she never changed much from her twelve year old self. In other ways, she surpassed me in years and aged before her time.
Several weeks ago, I took my niece to the airport, and I heard that familiar gravelly voice behind me, connecting all of her words as if there were no time to take a breath between them.
She was sitting with a very frustrated TSA agent. When I walked up, she explained to me that she had been given an airline ticket to California but had not brought any ID with her to fly.
The Agent asked her many questions about where she lived and who she was. He didn’t get farther than “Next to my grandmother’s.” In between talking to him, she spoke to me, and it quickly became apparent that someone was trying to traffic her out of state.
When the plane took off without her, I was thankful, but her large brown eyes pooled with tears. She was watching her last escape from a life of ugliness fly off without her.
I hugged her and took her to get some lunch.
As she sipped her pop, she asked about someone else in our church who had recently come out of a lifestyle of addiction to follow Jesus.
“Jesus has made him beautiful now,” I told her.
“That’swhatIneed!” she said. “I need Jesus.”
When Tyndale coined the term beautiful, I think that’s what he was thinking too. Jesus is so attractive that He demands our gaze and attention, and He is so timely, that He helps us to flourish, no matter how ugly and lost we’ve been.
“He has made all things beautiful in His time…”
“Yes. Jesus is what you need.”
Sarah Dixon Young 