Small faces bloom under my friend Rhonda’s paintbrush. Her canvasses come to her as children, but a few minutes later they leave as butterflies, tigers, flowers or pets. Even superheroes.
Rhonda’s art impresses me, but her character moves me. As her skilled hands paint young cheeks, foreheads and hands, I see a greater art form at play. She adores those kids, even the ones she doesn’t know. They sense her love, and adore her right back.
Rhonda painted faces at my granddaughter’s eighth birthday party on the beach last summer. “I don’t want presents,” Tabatha told her parents weeks earlier. “I have so much. I want people to give the money to poor children instead.” Her mother hired Rhonda, we all donated birthday money to Compassion Canada, then had one of the best parties ever. No piles of presents. Just butterflies and rainbows on faces. Splashes and sunshine. Lots of sunshine.
My grandbean and Rhonda shared something that day. A spark flew between them – the passion to help others because that’s what Jesus would do: Love. Serve. Beautify.
Rhonda’s love for Christ took her to Uganda in 2011. God had planted a seed in her through a friend who travelled overseas first. Rhonda nurtured that seed. Eventually, she visited her friend’s mission, a remarkable ministry to orphans and other desperately poor children. She has gone back to Africa twice since. Her face-painting funds the projects she helps with.
Not only children tug Rhonda’s heart. The poverty-stricken women of Uganda, many of them widows, do too. When she next returns there, just two weeks from this writing, she’ll first begin fixing up a property she has rented with the help of her small church here in Canada. They’ve caught her vision. Then she’ll buy treadle sewing machines to put in it. Four, at one hundred and twenty-five dollars apiece. And when everything is ready, she’ll spread the word.
They’ll come, those lovely, hungry, bitterly poor Ugandan women; some eager to see her again, some eager to meet her for the first time. She’ll welcome them. She’ll teach them to sew. Correction: she’ll teach them to live.
Rhonda Rowe is an ordinary grandmother. But she’s a radical Christian in that she wields the strongest power of all – Christ’s love. With that, she paints more than faces – she paints her world better. She teaches more than sewing – she demonstrates humility. She makes a difference in more places than Africa – she inspires people back home in Canada to greater boldness in their own faith.
Not every Christ-follower has the pull and the passion to leave home and family to go to where one’s skills are life. To give up birthday gifts so a less fortunate child can wear shoes. To support an overseas church project, when there’s barely enough to keep a roof on your own building. To let the love of Christ flow from them down their own streets.
But then, not everyone cultivates that kind of love. Even those of us who have the seed.
