A Little Girl and a Ring

She was a scrawny, skinny little girl with white-blonde hair in need of a good brushing. I met her one summer afternoon when our church van pulled into the Kentucky holler where her house was. She ran out of the house with a bunch of other children, all blonde, all curious to see us city folks. We had come to clean up and repair and paint her house, and it was in sore need of more than that, but we only had a week to do the most basic work. Some of us worked on the roof, some repaired the steps up into the house;  a few floorboards needed replacing and I was on the paint crew.
Poverty has a distinct smell. It's hard to describe: sewage, mold, unwashed bodies, mixed in with despair and hopelessness. I had never smelled anything like it before, but I knew instantly that it was the smell of poverty. It hung around and in the house on on its inhabitants. It got in my nose and my clothes and hung on me for a time after my week was over.
But the little girl, for her tangled unwashed hair, and dirty clothes, looked like a little angel. She hung around me all week; I was as much a curiosity to her as she was to me. She mostly watched me, talking once in a while to ask me a question or tell me about her siblings. Her mother had died and her father was raising 6 or so kids alone. For the rest of the week, she was waiting for me when I got off the van.
I felt pretty good about myself, working on her house, being a part of a group of kids making her life safer and a bit more comfortable. It felt good to help someone less fortunate; I felt almost smug, and as the end of the week approached I was patting myself on the back.
But she saw right through me. On the last day, as we were packing up the van, she was hanging around me as usual. But she was fidgety, restless, eager. As I hugged her goodbye, she pulled a ring out of her pocket and gave it to me. I could tell it was special to her, but we had been trained to let the residents share with us and give us things without rejecting anything, lest we offend them. I wanted with all my heart to tell her to keep it and treasure it, but I couldn't. So, with a lump in my throat and tears threatening to spill, I thanked her and accepted her gift.
All the long trip back from Betsy Lane Kentucky to Charlotte, I thought about that ring: Who gave it to her? How hard was it for her to part with it, or did she just give it freely and easily, as easily as she stole my heart?
I still have the ring. I take it out of my jewelry box once in a while and think of her. Where is she now? Is she living in the same squalid poverty, or did she get out? Is she loved? Have people loved her as easily as she did me?
I thought I was doing a good job sharing and showing God's love for her, but she showed me something equally, if not more, important. She showed me how we are to approach God: eagerly, joyfully, and willing to entrust Him with our heart. It didn't all make sense to me at the time; it would be almost 10 years before it did, when I approached God in a similar way. But she planted something in my heart that day, and it may have gotten smashed and ignored, it may have suffered from want of attention, but it took root, and stayed. God used a little girl, poor and needy, dirty and ragged, to teach me one in a long series of lessons. He used many people in my life to teach me more about Himself, and to lead me to Him, but I remember most clearly that sweet little girl and her heart.