Daniela hung up her office telephone and pushed everything out of the way, laying her head on her desk.
“God,” she said out loud, face to the hard surface, “As a human I cannot do anything. But you can do everything, so this is in your hands. Help him, please.”
In the Azores, Daniela works for an immigration non-profit where she must keep her faith out of conversations with clients. But behind the scenes, she often covers them with prayer. “I might not say I am a child of God,” she says. “But I can do it with my actions.”
The phone call had been about one of Daniela’s clients. His home country had made an error on his passport, and the government was blocking his appeal for a residency card. He was at risk of deportation. Daniela had spent several weeks, including her holidays, working to fight the mistake. A colleague had just called to tell her that the fight was over—there was no hope for approval. That’s when Daniela pushed aside her papers and began to pray. Her officemate, a non-believer, looked at her like she was crazy.
“There are sometimes situations that our human hands cannot touch,” Daniela says.
It had been an opportunity to serve her client and live her faith in a unique way, something Daniela practices on a regular basis at work. “People can recognize us as a child of God,” she says. “This is in the way we treat people, we love people, we look at people.”
Once, shortly after losing her own mother to illness, Daniela worked with a woman who urgently needed to return to her home country to be with her severely ill mother. The woman was at a critical point in her application process, and risked losing her immigration status if she left the country. Daniela felt compassion and empathy for the terrible decision her client had to make. She went home and prayed, interceding on behalf of both her client and her client’s mother. “I prayed for that situation and her mom,” Daniela says. Her prayers were answered. The woman went home, returning with no setback to her process. “And her mom is very alive,” Daniela says, smiling.
“I think sometimes the best testimony,” she says, “It’s not to say, but to be. If we can be an image of Christ in our job—even if we cannot say it with our mouth—people will see through our work. Through our actions. And this is what I try to do in my job.”
That devastating call that ended in prayer at her desk? One week later, Daniela received a second call. For an unknown reason, someone somewhere had changed their decision. The client’s residency card had been approved. Daniela’s response was swift: “Glory to God!” she said into the phone. Her office mate quickly asked what had happened. When Daniela shared the information, her colleague was stunned. She didn’t see how it was possible, but Daniela knew. “See what God has done,” she said.
“God is our strength,” Daniela says, encouraging people to express their faith every day in unique ways. “You should be different,” she adds. “He has called us to be the light of the world.”
-article by Sarah Norris
