Once again I found myself at Pao da Vida surrounded by many loud children either scrounging for crayons or trying to make sense of this strange, rosy-faced, white girl in the corner. When I finally get the courage to sit on the floor with a few of the boys, they show me their coloring with beams of joy shining through their dark, brown eyes. I manage to point to the baby in the manager and say, "Jesus," but mostly I am reminded of something I read just a few days ago:

"Once, when he was too ill to preach, Saint Francis simply stood before his congregation--mute--and gazed on them with love."
~From When God is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor