I don't remember her name.
I'm not sure I ever caught it.
I wish I did. 

She was small - maybe eight or nine - and I still remember the way her arms wrapped around my neck. It was during prayer one night on our mission trip to Honduras. Out of the whole room, she was the only one who came up to me. 

While others around me were praying over crowds of people, only one came to my arms. 

Her face was soaked with tears. 
I couldn't understand most of what she said - my Spanish wasn't strong enough to truly hear what she was saying - but I could feel it. 

Her pain. 
Her heartbreak. 
Her need to be held. 

So I just held her. Tight. 
For a long time. 

She didn't let go, and neither did I. 

And even now, months later, I still see her eyes when I close mine. 
I still feel her little arms wrapped around my neck. 
I still wonder what she was carrying that night, and what it meant for her to hand it over, even just for a moment - to someone like me. 

I remember looking down at her against my chest, my hands resting on her back, and thinking, God I don't know what to say. I don't even know most of what she's saying to me - please help me understand. 

Because presence was enough.
Because love doesn't always need to be translated. 
Because sometimes the most sacred thing you can do is stay - not fix, not explain, not even understand - just stay. In the moment. 

I don't know what she was walking through that led her to cry like that. 
I don't know what it cost her to be so vulnerable with a complete stranger. 
But I know that moment changed me. 

It was the kind of heartbreak that breaks you open, too - not in a way that wounds, but in a way that softens. That strips away the surface stuff and leaves you standing face-to-face with the raw, holy ache of being human. 

I didn't know anyone had taken a picture. 
Not until days later, when I was flipping through the trip photos on my camera. 

And there it was - that moment. 
Her arms around me. My arms around her. 
That sacred, tear-soaked stillness, frozen in time. 

I stared at the screen for a long time. 
My heart melted. 
My eyes welled up again, just like they had that night. 

Because it wasn't just a photo.
It was proof. 
Proof that something real happened. 
That she had been there. That I had. 
That presence had spoken when words couldn't. 

And I think about that now, often - how sometimes we look back and realize that the purest moments weren't the ones we planned or posted or even prayed for. They were the ones we simply didn't walk away from. 

Looking at that photo, something else stirred in me - something quieter, deeper. 

It's hard to explain, but in holding that little girl, I think I was somehow holding a part of myself, too. 

The little girl in me - the one who once felt small and unseen.
The one who longed to be scooped up, held tightly, and told without words: You're safe. You're loved. You don't have to carry this alone. 

That night in Honduras, I planned to pray for someone else. 
But God met me there, too - in a way I didn't expect. 
Not through loud worship or eloquent words, but through tears, through arms wrapped tight, through the holy language of presence. 

And maybe that's the mystery of moments like these: 
You show up to comfort someone else, and somehow, you walk away a little bit healed, too. 

I don't know her name. I may never see her again. 
But that moment - her arms around me, the way she wept, the way God met us both - will stay with me forever. 

The hug we exchanged was like an exhale for us both.

And maybe that's enough.
Just one moment of love given and received. 
Just one night where heaven touched earth - 
in tears, in stillness, in the simple act of holding on. 

Love came quietly, and it changed everything. 

xx,
Kaitlyn