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.