Marie

Today, my YRG journeyed to an… interesting place, home to a wonderful elderly woman named Marie. It was definitely one of the nicer houses we’ve seen on the mountain, and we ended up fulfilling the social need much more than the physical. What was disconcerting about the job was that the second you walked through the front door, immediately to your right was a room filled with just DOLLS. Frankly, it was alarming, and as one of my group members said, we would definitely not have been able to sleep peacefully in that room.

However, as we spent the day talking to Marie, we learned the history of those dolls. Marie got her first one when she was eight, and ever since, she’s been collecting. But the mass of them that we saw today (for there were well over 300) were actually her third or fourth collection. It turned out that when Marie’s first collection was still growing, many years ago, she met a woman who had cancer. This woman could only get proper treatment in Chattanooga, and barely had enough money for food, as she was trying to save it all for the trip to the doctor. When lovely, amazing Marie heard this, she donated all of her dolls to this woman, without a second thought, in order to sell and raise enough money for her treatment. Then, she started collecting again, and just as that collection had begun to overtake the size of the last one, she met another woman with the exact same problem: cancer, and no money to get treatment. And Marie? Well, Marie had the exact same solution: she once again donated every single one of her dolls to the health of this unfortunate cancer victim.

This story simply amazed me. The fact that Marie had been passionate about her dolls since her childhood, yet was so willing to part with them not once, but twice, for someone in need is inspiring to me. The theme at camp this week is sharing hope, and if this isn’t a prime example of it, I don’t know what is. I felt like the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover” was basically shoved in my face today; God showed me that something initially disturbing to me can really just be a mask hiding something enormously beautiful, and being able to discover what was behind those dolls’ masks made this day simply remarkable.

-Ashley DePeri.