From Jill...September 24th...

One of the surprises of this whole experience of international adoption for me is that I haven't cried that much. I expected that I would, but I guess we are so immersed in what we're doing day by day that we don't have time to see the big picture here. We're focused on parenting Collins and all that entails: loving her, gaining her trust, teaching her the basics, giving her boundaries and bonding with her. This is not the easiest thing we've ever done and we're far from perfect parents. We've lost our temper and we sure don't have the wisdom to know how to handle all that has come our way. Parenting her consumes us, but today at two different times, tears came to my eyes. We were riding in the van to take Conner to the airport. He's been gone two weeks and needed to get back to school. Collins' passport and visa won't be ready until the end of next week so we are here until then, and the time can't get here soon enough. We are very homesick. But on the van ride Collins was very happy, singing and laughing and kissing us, etc. Then she yawned, settled back in her seat and started hitting her head against the seat with her eyes closed. Over and over and over. She's done this in the middle of the night several times. We hear thump, thump, thump and she'll usually stop it if I go over and rub her head. But in the van she kept doing it, then she went side to side like Stevie Wonder does. Then she went to sleep with her thumb in her mouth. As I watched this tears came to my eyes. "Oh sweet baby girl, you had no one to rock you or comfort you to put you to sleep. So you figured out how to do it yourself." How I wish I could have gotten to her before now! The day we got her, I tearfully thanked the lady from the orphanage for loving her until we could get her. The day we went to the orphanage Carl thanked the nanny for loving her as well. But I just grieve that for the time she was 20 months old until a week ago, she was in an orphanage. It's not supposed to be that way. Children are not supposed to live in orphanages. They were created by God to grow up with loving parents. But we live in a broken world, and the existence of orphans are a sure sign of that. There are 143 million of them in the world. There are half a million children in the foster care system in the U.S. There are over 100,000 of those waiting for someone to adopt them. And each and every one has a heartbreaking story. We'll never know Collins' story. Did her parents let her go because of poverty? The one child policy? No one knows but she knows something didn't happen like it was supposed to. As I said earlier, she rarely sits still, but if she sees a mom with a baby she studies them. With Carl and I sometimes she will pretend to be a baby to get what she missed. She sometimes wants me to feed her even though she is as capable as an adult in handling a full glass of liquid and the use of knives and forks. Yesterday we were watching Carl and Conner play tennis and she wanted me to hold her and give her her water bottle like it was a baby bottle. Part of her story is that life in even the best orphanage doesn't allow for a baby to have somebody come every time they cry. It doesn't allow for being held and fed and cuddled and cherished. So we're making up for lost time.

Tonight we were putting her to bed. We've been singing, "Jesus Loves Me" the last couple of nights. What a great simple song with the most phenomenal truth in the history of the world: Jesus really does love me. That truth changes everything, and it's very doubtful that Collins would have ever heard that truth if she hadn't been adopted by a Christian couple. She was in a government run orphanage and has never heard anything like that. But we were singing it, and quietly she joined us. Tears! I have never heard anything more precious. This sweet little husky voice following along with us. I had to stop. The big picture of her hearing and knowing the love of Christ just overwhelmed me. As Carl has told me before, orphans are a huge unreached people group. Millions and millions of them around the world. I'm not trying to be dramatic nor am I trying to "spiritualize" this. But I just can't get past that this group of people has no voice, and that there are so, so many of them, and that each and every one has a heartbreaking life experience. We're not all supposed to adopt of be foster parents. But there are so many other ways to help them. Monthly support of a specific orphan, mentoring foster kids or teens, mission trips to build orphanages that better their lives, teaching life skills at a children's home, giving financially to help a couple adopt, helping to get clean water to those in 3rd world countries, etc. There are so many things we can do for them that can give them some dignity and in some cases literally save their life. Just today I was talking to one of the moms in our group who has adopted a 2 year old little girl. They got her a week ago and she was in bad shape. Something had bitten her in the back and it had gotten infected. One of the other adopting dads in the group was a pediatrician and he quickly took action. She had an infection so bad that it could have gone septic at any time. This mom was telling me their little girl may not have made it if they hadn't gotten her when they did. If it had been this week, she may not have been alive. This whole adoption of orphan experience has RESCUE written all over. I'll share more of these stories tomorrow, but each and every story is about RESCUE.