I was pulling up to a stop sign, headed to the store for last minute items, when I saw what I thought at first was a child rounding the corner.

Her hair, a dark red, was curly and sort of flipped over to one side. At first glance you would be forgiven for thinking it was an intentional style. She had on yellow overall shorts with little flowers and a white t-shirt. Simple white shoes and ankle socks. A small woman. At first glance you wonder briefly why such a small young woman is walking alone around the corner of the back of a harsh concrete wall of a store, looking so vulnerable.

You notice the twisted in of her knee, the toe pointed to the middle of her other foot. You see the right shoulder is severely twisted downward, her left rising upward, her spine is contorted into a horrid grimace of a vertical posture. Bent, twisted. Her face, at first glance appears calm, until you drive by and see the deep downward twist of her young mouth. You see her youthful, slim young face encased in lesions that extend down her bare arms and bare legs. She’s loosely swinging an empty bag of Lays potato chips with some crumbs in the bottom that some generous soul must have given her. As you watch, she slinks her long slender, lesion-covered arm into the bag and pulls her fingers out to lick at the remaining bits of salt and crumbs of chips clinging to the cellophane walls.

You pause at the incongruity. She is a child. She is a woman. She is covered in lesions, something out of some Biblical horror. Her body is grotesquely twisted from human causes.

She is.

So.

Young.

You drive by – what can you do? Pick up your items you require for dinner. Load your car. And … as you leave – you see her again. She’s moved. Now to the other end of the parking lot. Now standing aimlessly atop a parking curb, her empty bag of chips loosely swinging in her hands. She has nothing. No bags, no pushable cart filled with her belongings. She is utterly alone, vulnerable, young… but also feral and a little frightening.

I found myself wanting desperately to stop my car and push her inside and take her home, not unlike the stray cats and dogs I’d drag home to my mother as a little girl. I resisted… and that I think is my sin. My need to care for my children and myself first always rises to the top. I cannot bring a stray girl home and somehow, what? Save her? I wouldn’t know where to begin. I don’t have any medical skills, and she is most certainly heavily addicted to whatever they’re selling these days, and she is most certainly using her very young body to pay for the things she otherwise doesn’t have the means to.

She is someone’s daughter. There is a mother out there wondering where her daughter is, crying tonight because she does not know. And my heart breaks for her.

Tonight I found myself wishing, so much, for the power depicted in the Bible to be real. The ability to touch someone and heal her twisted spine, and cure her of her addictions, and soothe those aching lesions that must torment her. And I can do nothing at all but write this little blog and exorcise my own heartache that this is what becomes of children in this age. There is no indication she wasn’t loved, she likely was. She is simply addicted. And how very, very sad all of this is.

So pray with me, perhaps if we all, all of us pray, God will send an angel to her and heal her.