breaking huGS
I look like a softie. I know that. I’m aware of how people perceive me and how I look. It’s the lot God gave me so I’ll go w/it.
but i’m not a softie, at all. Those closest to me know that.
Friday, Sept. 28, 2007
As a kid, I aspired to be the next Sandra Day O’Connor. Or even just a lawyer.
In College, I mixed theater classes with political science. I got A’s in theater but I got A+’s in political science, reasoning & logic classes. My old, kookie-but-classic chairman of the P>S* field pressured me to look higher than the Mid-West, where I was, for law schools.
He drafted me a recommendation-letter to Harvard on his own accord.
I never mailed it.
By the time it was time for me to take the LSAT (at 21) . . . I had 2 babies.
Yep, call me fertile.
I had thought I could do it with one baby. But with 2 --- I knew myself too well. That same sense of justice that propelled me to follow a dream of a legal career propelled me to stay home w/2 babies as well. I was their mum. Granted, I was young & poor. But I was their mum. No one could give them what they needed from me in their early days. So I gave up law school ---- the dream of it, at least. I tossed my LSAT-prep books and forgot what I had studied. But the sense of justice w/in me remains.
So when God plopped me down in Africa in 2000 to live ------ he raped me.
Mary, or Maria - she goes by both (in the photo above, holding Sammy) . . . is one of these 12-year-old girls . . . who got her future stolen from her one dark and dirty night. Should she live another 10 years in a poverty-stricken nation now that she has HIV, she’ll be doing well.
I asked Mary what she wants to be when she grows up, she looked at me and said, “A lawyer.”
She will.
Because ultimately - a lawyer fights for justice. And I believe her story ---- which she and her mom are willing to tell in an effort to help others ---- will bring justice to those countless others like her. I believe her story will propel those of us, who have been afforded a grace in life that has kept us from such atrocities, to rise up and come alongside every last Mary in need. And I also believe her story will urge those of us, who have been hurt like her in ways we could not defend yet have healed and moved on as best we can . . . to rise up and help others whose wounds are more debilitating.
