Hope

I first saw her picture last February: a three-year-old in a bright yellow jumper, smiling shyly out from the rows of little faces on the HIV + Reece’s Rainbow page. Her name was Hope.

I stumbled on the Reece’s Rainbow site through a series of links from the blog of a broken-hearted mother unable to complete an adoption from EE. So many children needing families… I had always known vaguely about orphanages in EE, and dreaming of going to work there, but seeing all the faces made the problem seem overwhelming. 

I know it will be years before I’m able to adopt- I’m single, no job, no house, and working on a doctorate degree (expensive AND time consuming!) outside my home country. But I went compulsively through the profiles, alternately praying and despairing. And then Hope’s face drew me in. I couldn’t pray for them all, but I could pray for one, I decided. So I became Hope’s prayer warrior. 

She was on my screensaver, on my mind almost every night when I lay in bed… and then one day she disappeared. Vanished. I checked My Family Found Me. I eventually got up the courage to check the In Memoriam page. Thanks be to God, she wasn’t there… but it turned out her region had been closed.

Too late. I still pray for her sometimes, but I wonder what her future will be like. Will there be any good news for her this side of heaven? We can’t know. In many cases, we just don’t know what our prayers are doing. But people, let’s keep believing in what we can’t always see. Let’s not lose hope that God is taking care of Hope and for so many others that are ready and waiting to come home to families. There are so many waiting, and there is so much we can pray for. Keep going!

I leave you with words of hope through pain written by Lord Tennyson, 

and pictures of the girls I pray for now:

O, yet we trust that somehow good
    Will be the final goal of ill,
    To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

Arianna, 20 months old, R*ssia region 8 

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
    That not one life shall be destroy'd,
    Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete; 

 Gaia, 4 years old this month, R*ssia region 16

Behold, we know not anything;
    I can but trust that good shall fall
    At last--far off--at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring. 

 Brenna, 16 months old, R*ssia region 23

So runs my dream; but what am I?
    An infant crying in the night;
    An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.  

Tina, Orphanage 9 

Praise to You, God our Father, who hears our cries, and the cries of these beautiful little one. Please send families who are willing to welcome them into their homes and treat them as the precious children they are.

 

Hope