There are movies that pull me in with such magnetism that I lose any sense of time. 

 

Not this one.  

 

I watched The Maiden and the Mountain, which is barely twenty one minutes in duration. Yet I kept going back to see how much longer it was, counting the seconds until I could stop. 

 

I might have said that the plot is a window into the day of a young girl who scrapes out a living in Delhi. Except that a window would be an unimaginable luxury for her family. They have only gaps in the sheet metal. She wanders with stray dogs in the landfill for anything that might be sold for a few coins, or perhaps a not quite empty sack of food. 

 

Yet in watching her search for a broken chain, or pair of abandoned shoes, I found myself searching for something else. I craved assurance that God has not forgotten her. There were birds swooping around her, on their own hunt for a morsel. I thought of the promise I learned by heart when I was as young as this girl. 

 

“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" Matthew 6

 

In the final moments of the film I heard my answer. This child, the one who will never have swim lessons, or a new dress, expressed her dearest hope. She wants to go to school so that she can have a job and provide for her parents. Even in the chaos of her poverty, she has generosity.