Denise’s father had cancer. He passed away just a few months before she and her husband and children left America. In a small mud brick house 6,000 miles away in Africa, there was no grave to sit beside. There was just waking up again and again in a strange country, feeling the new and greater distance between herself and her father.

Denise’s family and missionary team faced other trials. They dealt with undiagnosed sickness and the dangers of raising children in a developing country. They lived through contagious disease, ethnic conflict, and family emergencies.

These are struggles I can’t imagine. I hear them from the other end of the red picnic table with a distant awe. Then she tells me about other pain, more mundane hurting, and the story settles over me with a familiar weight. “Even everyday chores were hard,” she tells me. “My skills, everything I had learned, felt useless there.” She was trapped, seemingly without the tools to cope in her surroundings. I imagine waking up in West Africa, breathing through the morning heat. The way Denise talks about it reminds me of waking up in my college dorm room, tired before the day even began, the weight of the world pressed against my chest like another blanket. Did she begin her days like I did, a feeling of failure settling over her skin like sweat?

Denise describes going to the market in West Africa. She would push her way through the vast crowds and the noise of an unfamiliar language as people pressed in, gawking at her pale skin. In the press of bodies, breathing was harder. Her palms sweated and trembled. “I didn’t have the skills to find the way home, or a bathroom, or my daughter if she became lost.” It should be the simplest thing, shopping for her family, but there it meant venturing into chaos.

She begins the story about the charcoal ladies, the one I came to hear. “This started during a time of finding God again, after a very dry time.” Denise would wander through the maze of vendor booths and bodies, looking for what she needed as people called for her attention—trying to sell her something, to correct her language, to ask her questions.

Squatting by the road were women selling charcoal. “I never needed charcoal, but they would always smile and greet me.” She didn’t need to buy anything from them, yet she was drawn to them—a still place in the crowd. “I was trying to find ways to be less afraid. I found I wasn’t afraid when I was just being friendly with people.”

Denise would greet the women in return and reach to take their hands. They always pulled back, turning up their palms to show her that they were dirty with charcoal. But she would take their hands anyway, clasping them tightly before she walked away. “Then, when I was overwhelmed in the market I would look down at my hands, at my blackened hands. If I did nothing else that day, at least I had made someone smile. I had taken the hand of a charcoal vendor, ignoring the dirt to grasp her humanity.” I am left with the image of Denise, lost in a crowd, staring down at her own grimy hands.

At the picnic table my pen stands still, bleeding ink into my paper. Denise leans her head against her hand. “God is good,” she says. “I learned even to be grateful for my father’s death because of what it taught me about the Lord.” To me this story, and this conclusion, are unsatisfying. I am caught in the detail, picturing Denise’s dirty hands, but the picture is not redemptive. It feels far too small, the good in life dwarfed by the enormity of her pain.

Denise and her family have not been able to return to life in West Africa. She has been sick for a long time with symptoms that have not yet been diagnosed. After years of preparation, after language learning, obtaining visas, and uprooting their lives to live in a strange new place, her family’s future in Africa is uncertain.

Denise tells me that she was drawn as a teen to be a missionary. She told Jesus, “If You are going to call me to missions, You have to make sure that I love it, please.” Through a few short-term missions trips, she found she did. After she had a family, she was drawn to Africa through a video of a man asking for a Bible for his people. She felt compelled by his words: “Please come. My people are welcoming. Don’t be afraid.” She has known since she was 13 that she was supposed to be a missionary. But if she cannot return to Africa, what is she supposed to be now?

I sit next to Denise, my eyes following the progress of a beetle along the grain of the wooden bench. What happens if you have to leave your calling? I’m not asking her; I’m tracing the lines in the bench with my fingers, my head heavy with the thought, hot under the sun. Denise insists that God is good. That is what she found, in the dust and heat and heartbreak of West Africa. She shares a verse to which she has clung throughout her trials: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13). But what does that mean? If so much of what she sees around her is not good, what is the goodness of God worth? The beetle skitters off the side of the bench, frightened by the shadow of my hands, and I am reminded of another missionary’s story.