At 3:24 in the morning on April 17, 2016, I sat in the dark and posted to Facebook — a habit from a season when Facebook was still where missionary friends and family members held vigil together — and I wrote one sentence I am still trying to learn from.

Praying for our sweet Ecuador tonight as they face the difficulties from this earthquake. So far, reports from our valley are of superficial damage only. We have yet to hear about the ministry center or our house.

Twenty-six words. Two of them — superficial damages — would turn out to be true. We have yet to hear what would turn out to be the truer line.

The earthquake had hit at 6:58 PM the evening before — a 7.8 magnitude rupture off the coast of Manabí that would, by the time the counting stopped, take more than six hundred and fifty lives. Bobby and I had both been in Southern California when it happened, speaking at separate engagements that weekend. From somewhere in that night, he had texted a single line at the bottom of an unrelated thread, in the small voice the news travels in when it has nowhere else to go yet. Quito had a nasty earthquake this afternoon. Everyone is safe, but some of our buildings took a beating. I’ll know more tomorrow.

I have thought about that sentence often since. Not because it was heroic — it was logistical, mostly, the way most of the next month was logistical. But because tomorrow was the only available word, we sent it anyway.

* * *

By the next afternoon, I could update the status. The ministry center was fine. Our house was fine. Please keep praying for the many, many churches and families who cannot say the same.

That second sentence is the one I have spent the better part of a decade trying to understand.

Christians say things like God is so good in moments like that one, and what we usually mean is we were spared. I understand the impulse. I have made that statement myself in seasons when there was nothing else available to say. But the longer I have done this work — the longer I have sat with parents and pastors and children for whom God was just as much theirs, and the building still came down — the less willing I have been to wrap a theological bow around the difference between my outcome and theirs.

We were fine. Pedernales was not fine. Manabí was not fine. The death toll, which would stop above six hundred and fifty, was that first night an unknown number that climbed every hour we refreshed the news. Both things were true. They did not need to be braided together to make a moral point. Please keep praying for the many, many churches and families who cannot say the same was the most honest sentence I had — an acknowledgment that the gap between our valley and their valley was not a thing I could close with gratitude.

I have come to believe that the spared have one job in moments like that, and it is not to perform thankfulness for the unspared. It is to stay close enough to the unspared that the gap does not become the end of the conversation.

* * *

For the next nine days, we did what people in our position do when something terrible happens nearby. We counted who was hurt. We counted who was missing. We counted what was needed, and we sent it. Food. Water. Tarps. Diapers. Bobby and our supervisors made calls to coastal pastors whose buildings had collapsed and whose churches were now the closest thing some neighborhoods had to a shelter. Sophie — my work partner, who knows our community in Quito the way only a Quiteña can — coordinated everything from her end, thirty-some weeks pregnant and a few weeks out from a daughter who is now my goddaughter. She could not load a truck. She managed the trucks. She managed the calls. She managed me.

This is the work most people picture when they hear earthquake relief. It is real work. It is necessary. It has the cleanest arc — a need, a thing, a hand, a delivery. It runs on adrenaline, existing infrastructure, and the muscle memory of churches that have done this before. I am grateful for that part. I am not going to pretend it is the part I learned the most from.

Around day ten — somewhere in the slow, uneven middle, when the trucks were still going west, and the news had moved on, but the funerals had not — I started to notice that we were missing something. The food was getting to the coast. The water was getting to the coast. The roofs were being patched. But a pastor in Manta whose church had become a shelter mentioned, almost in passing, that the children would not sleep at night. That they cried when their mothers went into other rooms. That they refused to go inside buildings with windows.

What that pastor was naming was something we had been quietly doing for years on our own campus — Agua Viva, on a hillside outside Quito — without yet calling it by any name. The same children, the same Saturday, the same lunch, the same workers who knew them by name. That is most of what trauma-informed care looks like when you slow it down far enough to see it. We had a practice. We had a posture. We did not yet have the vocabulary, and we did not yet have a framework for what happens to a child’s nervous system when the ground has just told them safety is no longer a guarantee.

So on the Tuesday morning of the second week — April 26 — I sat down at my desk and wrote a small email to a Lee University professor I had met once and barely knew, in the slightly apologetic tone of someone asking a favor they have no real standing to ask.

We are now looking at how we can do something to specifically help the children as they are beginning to get past the shock and are left to deal with the emotional trauma. We are thinking of sending in some care packages with coloring books about God’s love, some small toys, stuffed animals, etc. Can you recommend any more specific things we could do?

The instinct was sound. Look at any first responder anywhere in the world today, and you will find a stuffed animal somewhere in the kit — paramedics, firefighters, social workers, hospital chaplains. A soft thing pressed into a child’s arms is one of the oldest interventions we have, and it is still one of the truest. What I did not yet have on April 26 was the system around the stuffed animal. The vocabulary. The follow-up. The trained adult who would know what to do when the child finally started talking.

Heather wrote back within a day. She sent PDFs. She sent a children’s book about earthquakes, written by clinicians for displaced kids in disaster zones, in Spanish, which I could get printed at a shop in Quito for seventy cents a copy. She offered to come down with two psychologists and some of their former students and train pastors and Sunday school teachers in how to actually help. By the second week of May, eighteen of our former and current seminary students were sitting in a training room in Quito alongside that team from Tennessee, learning a vocabulary I did not yet have for the work I had been doing for fifteen years. We loaded suitcases with two thousand stuffed animals — vacuum storage bags are a missionary’s best friend — and we went to the coast.

* * *

We went back, and we went back, and we went back. Through the rest of May and into June and beyond, we returned to the coast over and over — Heather’s team and ours, then ours alone, then ours with whichever local pastors and teachers we had trained the time before. We did workshops with pastors. We did training with teachers. We did direct interventions with children in the makeshift refuges where families were still sleeping under tarps and tin, where somebody — sometimes a pastor, sometimes an army officer, sometimes a man who had appointed himself — was trying to keep order over a few hundred people who had nowhere to go and no clean way to feed themselves. We taught the Ecuadorians how to do the work so the work would continue when we left. After the first weeks, some of those refugees required special permission for outsiders to enter. We kept going.

I want to tell you what those first weeks were actually like, because I think the part that gets lost in the institutional retelling is the part most worth telling.

The buildings on the coast had crumbled, and the bodies of the people who had lived in them were still inside many of them. You could smell it. There was a stench around the city — a stench of death and destruction — and it followed us in the windows of the trucks as we drove between sites. Everywhere we stopped, somebody had a story to tell me. They told it to me because I spoke their language, and they wanted me to tell it to Heather, the visiting psychologist they had been told was the expert. They told their stories like they were handing me something heavy, and they watched my face for the moment when I would deliver back a miracle that would make the heavy thing lighter. I did not have that miracle. Heather did not have that miracle. We had a few techniques. We had a children’s book about an earthquake. We had a roomful of trained pastors. We had a stuffed animal in a vacuum bag.

What we had to say, in the end, was we love you, and we are here with you. In the face of that level of loss, that was both unbearable and the only honest thing I could offer. I have come to believe that we are here with you is the closest pastoral approximation of Emmanuel — God with us, most of us will ever get to offer. The people listening understood, more often than not, that we love you and we are here with you was not a substitute for the thing they wanted. It was, however, true. It was a sentence we could keep.

One afternoon, we tried to hand out food bags we had prepared for a refuge of several hundred people. The scarcity in the room was older than the earthquake. The earthquake had only sharpened it. Within minutes, I was pinned against a wall by people begging for one more bag, one more for this aunt, one more for that grandmother, one more for the family, two tarps over who had lost everything. A local pastor reached me quickly. He stood between me and the room and spoke in the voice you learn to speak in when you have lived inside scarcity your whole life — the kind of voice that calms a crowd not by performing authority but by reminding the room of itself. The crowd settled. The food bags were distributed. I was not harmed. I had also never been pinned against a wall before, and I have never quite forgotten the way the wall felt against my back, or the way the pastor’s voice held the room together while my hands were still shaking.

That night, I lay in a borrowed bed and thought, this is what the children inside this refuge fall asleep to. This is what they wake up to. They refused to go inside buildings with windows, the pastor in Manta had said. Of course they did.

* * *

The aftershocks continued for months. Strong ones. Strong enough that we could feel them at our house in Quito, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. One night, Bobby and the rest of the team were at the coast working, and I was home with our five-year-old. The tremors that evening were close enough together that I made the decision to leave the structure. I did not want him to be scared, so I framed it as an adventure — we were going to take a blanket out to the yard and look at the stars, the way we sometimes did on clear nights when the city below us went quiet.

Our backyard, on the outskirts of Quito, sits at almost ten thousand feet on the equator, which means the sky above it on a clear night is the kind of sky you do not forget. There is less ambient light than in most of the city. The stars are close enough to feel like a roof of their own. We sat on the blanket. We watched videos on his little iPad. The ground shook several more times underneath us. The back wall of our house — almost floor-to-ceiling glass — held, but one pane cracked clean across, a thin line we would only find in the morning. He did not know that was why we were outside. He thought we were having an extra adventure, and we were having an extra adventure, and both things were true.

What I could not stop thinking about, on that blanket, was that I was experiencing — at the lowest possible dose, hundreds of miles from the rupture, with a roof I trusted still over my belongings and a child whose nervous system had no reason yet to panic — what the children in those coastal refuges were experiencing several times a day. They had already been buried once. They had felt the building they trusted decide it was not a building anymore. And now, every few hours, the ground was reminding them that the first time had not been the only time. There is no children’s book written for that. We brought the one that came closest, and it was not enough, and we kept bringing it anyway.

I have thought about that blanket often. I think it is closer to the center of what I learned that year than any of the training sessions.

* * *

The story that gets told about that response is usually told in the institutional voice. It is the story of a partnership that became a lineage; an organization that pivoted in three weeks toward a trauma-informed framework that would shape the next decade. All of that is true. None of it is what I learned.

What I learned is that being spared is not the same thing as being chosen, and being chosen is not what God does to people in earthquakes anyway. What I learned is that the gap between the valley with the working roof and the valley with the stench of death is not a gap you close with theology, or with gratitude, or with the right framework. You close it, as much as it can be closed, by going. By staying. By telling the woman handing you the heavy story of her loss that you do not have a miracle, that the visiting psychologist does not have a miracle, that what you have instead is your presence and your willingness to come back next month, and the next, and the next.

The buildings in our valley were fine. That was the gift, and that was also the assignment. Please keep praying for the many, many churches and families who cannot say the same — that was the closest I came, in those first hours, to a theology of being spared. I am still inside that sentence. I expect I will be inside it for the rest of my life.

We love you. We are here with you. It turns out that is not nothing. It turns out, on some days, that is most of what there is.

* * *

Tamitha Lynch writes from twenty-five years of walking alongside vulnerable children whose stories are not hers to tell. She has lived and worked in Ecuador for two decades, establishing a community-based outreach focused on the holistic care of children, where the THRIVE Model™ was born. The work has taken her throughout Latin America, equipping churches to care for vulnerable children through trauma-informed care, and now around the world.

By Tamitha Lynch

A pastor in Asia, who has an outreach ministry to street children, called me last spring with the news that he and his wife had rescued a young girl from trafficking. I could hear the joy in their voices — the bright, particular joy of those who have just seen something holy — and the rescue itself was a kind of miracle. I told them so. What I did not tell them, at least not right away, was that their next plan was going to undo the very thing they had just risked their lives to build.

The couple was scheduled to present a report at a regional ministers’ meeting and thought it would bring great joy to everyone to see the girl. They had no ill intent. They simply had not yet been taught to see the trip from the child’s point of view — an unfamiliar city, the noise of the meeting hall, the strangers wanting to talk to her and hug her and greet her — every one of these sensory experiences landing on a delicate body that had been trained to always brace for harm.

I have been on the receiving end of calls like this for many years, mostly with my work in Latin America. The people on the other end of the line are almost always good. They are pastors and foster parents, youth leaders and tired grandmothers — people who love a wounded child and are about to do something well-meant that will hurt her. The wounding is rarely dramatic. It is small, and it comes from everywhere. Often it is our decisions that re-open old wounds.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a long moment, and I thought about a twelve-year-old girl from a different century.

A Gospel Story You Have Heard a Hundred Times

There is a story in the Gospel of Mark that almost every churched person recognizes on sight. A father, a synagogue leader named Jairus, has just lost his only daughter. He has done the only thing left to do — he has run, uncharacteristically and without dignity, to find his friend, the young rabbi from Nazareth whom everyone is either whispering about or whispering against. He begs. Jesus agrees to come. But by the time they reach the house the mourners are already in full cry. The flute players have arrived, and someone in the crowd is saying the unthinkable out loud. His sweet child is dead.

Jesus sends the crowd outside. He takes the girl’s cold hand. And in the warm, intimate dialect of a Galilean home — Aramaic, the language of bedtime and breakfast and you are safe now — he speaks: Talitha koum. Tender one, arise.

She does.

We tend to stop the tape there. Because the resurrection is where the wonder is. But it is what happens next that has stayed with me.

Imagine being Jairus. Imagine being his wife. You have just watched your daughter open her eyes. You are shaking, weeping, and absolutely certain at this moment that every person in that village — in that whole grieving world — needs to hear — must hear what just happened in this room.

And Jesus turns to you. His very first instruction is not go and tell. It is, “tell NO ONE.”

And his very second instruction, more astonishing still, is not pray, fast, praise. It is give her something to eat.

Read that again, slowly. His first instruction was not evangelism. It was protection.

His second was not theology. It was a sandwich.

She had just been through something enormous. Whether you read the story as a literal resurrection or as a healing the gospels record in resurrection language, the reality in her small body is the same. Her nervous system has just absorbed more than it can handle. And the rabbi who spoke to her in her own bedtime dialect looked at the ones who loved her most and said, in effect: not yet. Not the crowd. Not the questions. Not the spectacle. Protect her. Feed her. Let her come back to herself slowly, in the quiet safety of her own home, surrounded by people she had known all her life.

That is trauma-informed pastoral care — modeled for us by the only one who has ever done it perfectly.

What the Body Knows

When any person has been through something so enormous, a physiological reaction happens inside their body – one that, outside of the miraculous — a rescue, a prayer, or a good intention, cannot undo.

Her nervous system has been conditioned by repetition. It has learned, somewhere beneath her thoughts, what it must do to survive. For a child who has been trafficked or abused in such a way, that conditioning is particularly cruel. Her body has learned that attention from adults is usually the prelude to harm; that the safest response to being looked at is to comply, and that the safest way to comply is to smile. Her body has learned that her story is a currency other people spend.

This is not a lesson the body unlearns quickly. During chronic trauma, the brain literally rewires itself to stay in a constant state of fight-or-flight in order to keep her alive. The Creator who designed those neural pathways also designed our brains to heal — but that healing comes the way Paul describes it, through the daily renewing of the mind. Renewal, in the original sense, is not a single moment of replacement. It is a making-new-again, a slow process of restoration.

Healing comes — by grace, by patience, by safety, by the long faithfulness of trustworthy adults — but it comes on the body’s own clock.

A ministry, or a family, or a friend group that greets such a child the way we normally would greet her — by shoving a microphone in her face, or asking her to share a testimony (language she doesn’t understand), that circle of kind faces leaning in with questions — is not actually meeting her. It is triggering the same defenses that have been keeping her alive. She will smile. She may even appear to enjoy the attention. She will be on her best behavior, because best behavior is how she stayed alive. And the adults around her will say, afterward, how beautifully she did.

That…is…not…healing. That is the same response of compliance that kept her alive in the dark; now deployed in a church sanctuary.

What a wounded child actually needs is the most unremarkable thing in the world. A plate of food. A familiar corner. A few trusted adults, every single day, for months, and then for years. The same bedtime prayer. The same small kindnesses, repeated a thousand times, until the body finally begins to believe it’s true.

Attachment, as the developmental research insists and as every grandmother already knows, is built through repetition, not excitement. And for her, excitement and threat are still, for now, indistinguishable.

The One who knit her nervous system together in her mother’s womb knew this, before any of us did. It is why, two thousand years ago in an upper room in Capernaum, after raising a twelve-year-old girl from death, His very first words to the people who loved her most were not go and tell. They were tell no one. Give her something to eat.

The Pattern, Everywhere

Once you really see it — the pattern — you see it everywhere.

You see it in the family whose daughter just came home from the pediatric ICU, whose first Sunday back at church is an ambush of gentle arms reaching for her, and whose parents have no language yet for why she is so fussy all the way home afterward.

You see it in the foster parent on day one, facing a well-meaning extended family that wants to throw a welcome party, when what this child actually needs is a dull Tuesday, the same PB&J for lunch two weeks running, and permission to be bored.

You see it in the mission team that asks the local pastor to “bring some of the kids” to a donor gala, when the local pastor knows — in the quiet way local pastors know — that those kids are not ready for a room that bright.

You see it in the youth leader whose teenager just disclosed something terrible, and who, out of pure love, wants to rally the youth group around her. That teenager is watching her leader’s face very carefully — trying to determine, in that moment, whether her story still belongs to her.

You see it in the small group rushing to “check on” the friend whose marriage just ended — when what she actually needs is one person who will bring her coffee on a Thursday morning and not ask a single question.

You see it in the pastor on a first visit to a widow, who opens with a prayer before noticing that she has not had a proper meal in three days.

You see it in a parent’s own home, at the end of a very long school day, when a seven-year-old walks through the door with a flat face and a quiet voice — and the wise parent pours a glass of milk, offers a plate, and asks nothing at all until the body is fed.

The Jesus pattern in that upper room in Capernaum is not a specialized technique for orphanages, or trauma therapists, or anti-trafficking ministries. It is the ordinary shape of how a wise community loves a wounded person. Quiet. Unhurried. Fed. Protected from the crowd — not because the crowd is hostile, but because her body cannot yet metabolize a crowd.

The question to ask, when you stand near someone who has just walked through something enormous, is not what should I say? or how can we celebrate this? The question is far simpler, and far more like Jesus. What does her body need next, and who already knows her name?

The rabbi who looked at Jairus and said don’t tell anyone, and give her something to eat was not teaching us how to run a rescue shelter. He was showing us how to love anyone, anywhere, who has just been through more than they yet know how to hold.

The First Miracle, and the Second

I do not want to be hard on the pastor who called me. He and his wife are, in many ways, more faithful than I am. They noticed a child no one else noticed. They paid a price I have not paid. They signed the papers, rearranged their lives, and kept a promise in the dark. What they need from the rest of us is not criticism. They need the second miracle.

The first miracle is the rescue, the healing, the turning point — the moment God moves and the impossible happens. Thank God for every healer, every rescuer, every parent and pastor and teacher who shows up for that first miracle when no one is watching.

The second miracle is quieter. It is the family that closes its doors against the questions and lets a child just be bored for a while. It is the small group that shows up with soup instead of advice. It is the ministry that turns down the viral story in favor of the tenth ordinary bedtime. It is the friend who sits on the porch for an hour and never once asks how are you really? It is every one of us choosing, over and over, the long and unspectacular shape of love.

That first miracle is stunning! The second is SACRED.

That little girl needs both. So does every wounded soul God has placed in your life. Just look around with open, trauma-informed eyes so you can really see.

A Note on Sources

The theology in this piece draws on two centuries of New Testament scholarship on the pattern many scholars call the Messianic Secret, including work by N. T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Joel Marcus, and Morna Hooker. The trauma science reflects the consensus of contemporary child-development and trauma research, particularly the work of Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk, and Karyn Purvis, alongside the resilience research summarized by Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. A full reading list is available on request.

Tamitha Lynch writes from twenty-five years of walking alongside vulnerable children whose stories are not hers to tell. She has lived and worked in Ecuador for two decades, establishing a community-based outreach focused on the holistic care of children, where the THRIVE Model™ was born. The work has taken her throughout Latin America, equipping churches to care for vulnerable children through trauma-informed care, and now around the world.

The house in Quito sits at ten thousand feet, on a slope outside the city, with a Spanish-tile roof I had wanted since I was a girl and the perfect kitchen I designed just for me while lying awake at night, reaching for things in the dark. Reaching for the colander before I knew I needed it. The salt where my hand would go. We bought it in 2012. I was thirty-something with three children and a ministry I had just helped found, and I thought I had reached the place where life gets steady. I thought the pinnacle was an actual elevation you climbed to and stood on.

The backyard was overgrown when we moved in — like a small forest grove behind the glass wall that ran the whole back of the house, no curtains because no one could see in. I worked with a gardener who kept wanting to make everything trim and square, the way Ecuadorian gardens are supposed to look, and I kept telling her, no, I want it wild on purpose. I want it to look like it grew that way. She was patient with me. She drew sketches and we walked the yard together and eventually she made it the way I had been trying to describe: meandering stone path, asymmetrical beds, plants overflowing into each other. Wildness, but planned.

The covered porch was the heart of it. We put wicker furniture out there. We hung hummingbird feeders. Bobby and I would sit in the late afternoon and watch the sparkling violetears came in to drink — the ones with the iridescent green bodies and the violet patches on the sides of their heads — and watch the butterflies, and at dusk the fireflies, and beyond all of that the volcano on the horizon. Pichincha. Active, occasionally smoking, always there. The weather at that altitude on the equator stays between fifty-five and seventy-five degrees most days. Perfect, if you are a hot-natured person, which I am. You can sit on a porch like that all day and not need a sweater and not need air conditioning and not need anywhere else to be.

It was the most peaceful place I have ever known.

What I did not understand then is that you can finish the kitchen of your dreams and a year later be sitting at the counter trying not to weep into the dishes. The pinnacle is not a destination. It is a place you are passing through.

* * *

I will not tell you the specific shape of what came next, because the story does not belong only to me. I will say that within a few years of moving in, our family entered a long season of difficulty I had not seen coming and was not equipped for — the kind of season that involves mental health crises and choices about how to keep people you love safe and alive — and we made the decision to spend the school years in the United States to be near family. Five years of bouncing back and forth. Two months in Ecuador in the summer. A few weeks here. A few weeks there. The house sat without us for most of every year.

I cried during those years more than I have cried in any other season of my life. Some of that was for what was happening inside our family. Some of it was for the work I had left behind, the children at Agua Viva, the staff who carried things while I was gone, the version of myself I only had access to when I was in Quito. I would dream about the porch. I would wake up in Alabama and feel for a second the cold tile floor of a kitchen six thousand miles away.

There is a particular grief that comes from giving up the place you love for the people you love. I do not know that anyone tells you to expect it. It is the right thing to do, and you do it without much hesitation, and it still takes years off your life.

In 2020, the youngest was finishing elementary school. We had a window — a moment when everyone was stable enough and old enough — to move back full-time. I was forty-something now. Ecuador had become the place I returned to instead of the place I lived in, and I needed to live in it again before too much more time passed.

We moved back in May 2020.

You can imagine how that went.

* * *

COVID hit Ecuador hard. Guayaquil was on the international news because the morgues filled and the bodies were left in the streets while officials tried to figure out what to do. The country closed. We had curfews. We had license-plate days, when only certain plate numbers could drive. We had to wear masks in the car alone. For about eighteen months there was no in-person school.

For me, this was not the worst of it. We had a small bubble — Sophie Moncayo, my partner in this work for almost two decades, the closest thing to a sister I have, and her family — and we did the holidays together. We carved pumpkins. We dyed Easter eggs. We celebrated Christmas and New Year. The pandemic took a lot from a lot of people, and I do not want to pretend otherwise, but for me it was eighteen months of being able to sit on the porch and not feel like I was about to lose it again. I was home. I was working. The hummingbirds were there.

Meanwhile, on the coast, the cartels were getting worse. Not new — Ecuador has been in their corridor for a long time — but the violence was escalating in ways that made the news every week. Kidnappings. Bombings. Prison riots. The city of Guayaquil became one of the most dangerous in the hemisphere. Up in the mountains, we felt insulated. The mountains usually do feel insulated, until they don’t.

In late 2022 our team was asked to lead a children’s ministry event on the coast. Several hundred kids over a few days. We flew the whole staff over. The house was empty for the first time in months.

Coincidence of all coincidences, that night someone broke in.

* * *

They had studied us. That was the part I could not stop thinking about afterward. They knew where the cameras were and avoided most of them. They knew the back of the property is shielded from neighbors by the slope of the land, the way I had loved when we bought the house. They got all the way to the back door before they triggered the alarm. They smashed the glass. They went through every room. They went through every drawer. Every drawer. They were in my underwear. They were in the bedside table where I keep the things you keep next to a bed. They went through our kid’s room. They went out my bedroom balcony and dropped down and ran.

The security company called us that night. Everyone we would have sent to check on the house was with us, two hours away by plane or ten by car. We found a friend who could go. We knew there would be no resolution. There never is, in Ecuador, for things like this. It is too common. The police take a report - if you can get them to come - and the report goes nowhere.

What is strange is that I did not really fall apart over the loss. They did not get the things that mattered most to me. My emerald ring was hidden where they did not think to look. We were physically safe. The dog was safe. They did not burn anything down. By the standards of what cartel violence was doing to other people that year, we had been only lightly grazed.

What broke me was the next night, after we got home. I stood in front of my lingerie drawer and looked at the disheveled stacks of folded clothes someone had pawed through, and I thought: they touched all of this. They were in here. They knew where to come.

Someone had been watching. Someone had decided which night.

The violation was not the loss of stuff. The violation was the discovery that the place I had thought of as private was a place that someone had been learning.

* * *

A month later, Bobby and I started talking about the wall.

I did not want the wall. Almost every other house in Ecuador has a wall — six feet, eight feet, ten feet, brick or concrete, topped with broken glass or razor wire or electric fence or all three. Ours had been one of the rare exceptions, because of how the land sloped and how the neighbors sat. The wall-less view was part of the reason we had bought the place. The glass back of the house was part of why I had wanted it. I had spent a decade trying not to live behind a wall.

But Bobby is wise, and our security people were clear, and the people in our small Ecuadorian community whom I trust were unanimous, and I knew before I admitted it that the wall was not optional. Whoever had broken in had not been caught and would not be caught and could come back. They had picked us. We had been picked.

I cried a lot during those weeks. I went back and forth and back and forth — what if we do this instead, what if we extend only here, what if we add cameras instead of a wall, what if — and Bobby was patient with me. We compromised in one place: we kept one corner of the property open, just enough to keep a sightline to Pichincha. I would not give up the volcano. I had given up enough.

When the wall went up, I cried again.

And then I made my own peace with it the only way I knew how, which was to refuse to let it be ugly.

I spent weeks online searching for ironwork. I did not want the cold vertical bars I have seen on every other Ecuadorian house. I did not want a fortress aesthetic. I wanted something that read like garden before it read like fence. I sketched. I sent ideas to a metal worker. I designed a curving piece of bronze ironwork with cutout flowers in it, set into the open corner — a piece of metalwork that holds the volcano view and keeps us safer and is, on its own, a beautiful thing.

The ironwork went in. It held. It still holds.

There is electric fence wire running along the top of the brick. You can see it if you look — a thin line above the warm orange brick, a faint silver against the green of the climbing flowers that have grown up to cover the wall. That is what is actually keeping the people out. The bronze ironwork is what is keeping me in.

* * *

I sit on that porch most mornings. The hummingbirds still come. The volcano is still there in the corner I refused to give up. The wall is there too — terracotta brick, electric wire along the top, beauty in the corner. All of it at once.

This is the platform’s name. This is what The Barbed Wire Garden is.

Twenty-five years of working with vulnerable children has taught me that some threats can be fenced and some cannot. The wall keeps out the human ones. It cannot do anything about the volcano on the horizon, which is active, and which has sent ash before, and which will again. It cannot do anything about the things that go wrong inside the houses of people I love. It cannot do anything about the slow grief of years given up to the right reasons. It cannot do anything about most of what hurts.

What it can do — what the iron arch I designed can do, what the writing I do here can try to do — is insist that what we make in response to the things we cannot prevent will be beautiful. The fence will be a garden too. The protection will hold the view of the volcano open. The work that comes out of the hard years will be tender, will be true, will be made with care.

I am the practitioner who learned, slowly, that God does not always rescue. He does not always prevent the break-in. He does not always restore the perfect view. He does not always heal the child in the timeline you would have chosen.

But he is with you in the room. He is at the back door when the alarm goes off. He is in the laundry drawer the next night when you stand there with your hands on the disheveled stacks of clothes and try not to come apart. He is on the porch the morning the wall goes up. He is in the design of the iron arch. He is in the corner you refused to give up.

This is where I write from. This is what the writing is about. The barbed wire garden is not a metaphor I made up. It is the actual place I sit, most days, when I am home.

Pull up a chair.

* * *

Tamitha Lynch writes from twenty-five years of walking alongside vulnerable children whose stories are not hers to tell. She has lived and worked in Ecuador for two decades, where the THRIVE Model™ was born out of the children’s ministry she co-founded with her husband Bobby Lynch, PhD. Her work has taken her throughout Latin America and now around the world, equipping churches to care for vulnerable children through trauma-informed care.