Gabby is sixteen years old and wants to be loved just like anyone else. She smiles thinking about that certain boy looking in her direction, she laughs with her friends about awkward moments, and sometimes she gets down on herself.

She’s one of my daughter’s closest friends, and like my daughter, she lives in the moment. That’s probably one of the reasons she was able to do what she did one Sunday morning in Mexico.

Every spring, my family and I travel with an incredible team of people to a little farming town in the middle of Mexico called Boquillas. And the real beauty of that place is the people— their smiles, their love for celebrating, and their willingness to give up their comfort to make others feel at home.

Our first morning there was a Sunday. A few of us, including Gabby, walked the dusty road uphill to one of the little churches in town. Trash blew up and down the street with the dust, and the morning sun felt hot on our backs.

We stepped off the street and passed through a tiny courtyard.  The pastor greeted us as we walked through the door, shaking each of our hands.

“Bienvenidos!” he said with a smile spreading across his face. We found our seats in the simple wood pews, and I watched him talk to the band in the front. He seemed tired, beaten down by life.

The church was simple, basically a square white building with peach walls on the inside. There were fake, dusty flowers placed in the front, and sunlight poured through the windows, hitting that bright paint and lighting up the room.

The service started with a woman welcoming us. I could only understand bits and pieces of her Spanish, and when she was done, the band started to play. We all joined in as best we could, clapping our hands with enthusiasm and smiling.

Then, the music finished, and the pastor came to the front. He lifted his hands and spoke in Spanish words that seemed to be directed at us.

Cheryl had told us earlier that the pastor might ask if we have a blessing to offer. She was the team leader, and she loved the people in Boquillas like her own family, so we trusted her. When the pastor finished talking, I wondered if he was inviting us to offer a blessing like Cheryl mentioned.

He waited.

Then Gabby got up from her seat and started walking to the front.

You’re kidding me! I thought.  Of all the people in our group, Gabby is going to the front?  A sixteen-year-old girl?

Her eyes were on the pastor as she walked. Everyone watched in frozen silence. She smiled, reaching out for the microphone.

Questions rolled through my mind like the clickety clack of a roller coaster just before the free fall.

How is she doing this? And she doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish.

What is happening right now?

How is she so calm?

Despite the noise in my head, the church was silent. This was Gabby’s first time at this church—her first time in Boquillas for crying out loud, but she took the microphone like she’d been doing it for years.

She didn’t try to introduce herself. She didn’t say a word. How could she? She had no translator. She just smiled, lifting the microphone to her mouth.

And then she sang.

“Alaba a Dios mi corazón.”

Each word had me on the edge of my wooden pew.  I knew she loved to sing.  That was one of her roles on the team.  But alone, up front, in a language she couldn’t speak?

I couldn’t make out every line, but I knew she was telling her heart to praise the God who saw her better than any of us. To Him, she was perfect for that moment. To Him, despite not knowing Spanish, she was ready. To Him, she was beautiful!

And she was. Her voice wasn’t anything like what I expected from the small frame of a 16-year-old girl. It was confident and strong, inviting the guitarist next to her to start playing along. The two of them couldn’t hold a conversation, yet together, they entered into something sacred.

I looked to see if she had some Spanish lyrics in front of her, but there was nothing. She had memorized every line and was singing like she had been living in Boquillas all her life.

And even if there were lyrics in front of her, she couldn’t see them. Her eyes were closed.

That’s it, I thought. That’s her secret. To Gabby, this wasn’t a performance. The moment was between her and God. She sang, and I looked over at her parents.  They were also closing their eyes, and then I couldn’t hold it back–the tears came.

“Te alabo en el medio,” she sang. “Estando rodeado porque cuando alabo, Tú estás a mi lado.”

She moved her head from left to right as she sang, caught up with the music.

Later, I found the translation for those words: “I praise you in the middle, being surrounded, because when I praise you, I know You are by my side.”

She was in the middle.

We didn’t know it at the time, but later in the week, we would talk with a family still in grief over the suicide of a child. We would eventually be startled by the cries of a woman struggling with anxiety attacks, and we would listen to a mother—holding her children in her lap—ask us to pray that her husband wouldn’t drink anymore.

Gabby was singing “in the middle” of all that, surrounded by kids without fathers, fathers without hope, and pastors who were tired.

Yet she wasn’t afraid.

She knew as she sang that the One to whom she was singing was standing right beside her. For that small sacred moment, her voice was His. It was the sound of hope echoing off the peach-colored walls, piercing the darkness, lightning the load carried by the people in that sweet little town.

And the same God making the purple flowers bloom on the jacaranda trees just outside was making Gabby bloom in front of all of us. She saw herself through His eyes, embracing the woman He wanted her to become, and everyone watching was changed because of it.

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