He giggles upstairs. Him and the daughter who sat, distraught on a bench with me many weeks ago. (See story below) A dark skinned boy his age, sits cardboard-like, on my eighteen year-old’s night stand.
“Whose that?”
I peek my head around the corner, and two children, eighteen and five, face each other, half curled up, holding the photo of the boy that my daughter chose from Compassion, at our Missional Women Conference a few month ago.
“He looks like me”, I hear him question and I can almost see the dancing in his eyes.
“I know. That’s why I chose Him.” My older daughter says of her new sponsor from Africa.
Oh, how love never let’s go. In a world of “microwave-love”, temporary, expendable, passing, or easily switched on and off with every emotion love…God’s love is lasting….always brings beauty. Maybe now, maybe three years after it’s been lost…
And we must crucify the lie ingrained in all of us…that “getting”, “hoarding”, “possessing” is the whole essence of our existence?
For true legacy’s have eternal possession, and love unending can impact a child from Africa, if we let it.
Yes, love doesn’t ever stay stagnate…it ripples.
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A white man sits a bench down from me at the park. It should have been a glorious day; sun shining, children laughing, playing; life balancing on the edge of spring.
But a child giggles loudly; heart sinks, history comes dancing back; his face; dark, round, smiling bright with white teeth like the one I keep missing, deeply. Regret strikes as I see him, a reflection plunging me back into the depths I keep swimming from.
My eighteen-year-old next to me shifts on our bench. I know that stance well, one of sorrow, regret. “We must forgive, and move on,”I whisper robotically through my lips, wishing formulas really could heal heart wounds, and time really was the cure for this suffocating loss I feel.
“Is she yours?” The man next to me nods towards my own dark skinned, adopted daughter playing freely on the playground.
“Yep. Those yours?” I point to the two African-looking boys playing with her.
And God knows we need help in our bumpy roads to healing, some kind of angel to speak life into us when this seemingly eternal wrestling of Jacob, just won’t fix us.
As foster parents, the biggest question I hear is, “How do you let them go?” Whenever I hear it, I want to laugh; as if I have some secret to not getting ground up, each time I look on an orphan.
I mean, if love truly has no ending, isn’t it a question of, “How do you separate from them?” Because in reality; true, deep, eternal, God-love….neverlet’s go.
I found out my bench neighbor is, Matt….
Today I am writing over at Missional Women. Click HERE, meet my new friend Matt, and read the rest of the story….
