summer is falling golden and the combines cutting crops into cash. steel aluminum pots boil apples and the oven afire with crisp and pie, and you can smell the cinnamon as you walk the road strewn with autumn. everywhere children in school, their shoes squeaky new and the bus blending yellow with the leaves. and the wives have on aprons and the husbands, overalls, everywhere, the face of harvest.
until sunday when pews sink beneath skirts and tie, their faces wrinkled tired and brown. and eyes turn to the girls doing a presentation, girls who’ve gone to an orphanage. and i’m in the back with my baby in my arms and i can’t turn away. from the babies on the overhead screen, babies without mamas, babies whose mamas dropped them off because they just couldn’t, and babies who at 12 will be forced to leave.
“God’s littlest angels”, they call them, and they seem so happy in spite of wearing no shoes and their eyes are round and shiny, but where do orphans go when it’s time to go home?
kasher’s jeans are tight around fat thighs and the children on the screen, so thin, i wish to hold them and tell them they are so, so beautiful and my eyes burn hot. what is a child without a family? “they must be born with an extra ounce of grace,” my mother in law tells me. oh, that this grace would know no bounds.
i’m staring now at the back of my husband’s head. he’s wearing the blue collared shirt i love and i want to kiss his cheek for i know he’s hurting too. but what do you do when you want to adopt the world, and you know you’ll break for the love? “where do they go when they turn 12?” he whispers as i slide back beside him. kasher is asleep and i have no answers and we sit quiet, as the combines in the field, while the pastor prays.
1. link up a post (old or new) that you feel is ‘broken’ or ‘imperfect’ or somehow redemptive
2. put the ‘imperfect prose’ button at the bottom of your post, so others can find their way back here (see button code in right-hand column of my blog)
3. read other’s prose, and encourage them!
*prints of African paintings available here*
*today i am pleased to offer you a beautiful resource by my friend Donna Schultz, an e-book which speaks to the homelessness in each of us, the longing to know that we belong.*
Lessons from Ruth: Discovering Your Destiny
By Donna Schultz
Buy Now!
“Lessons From Ruth: Discovering Your Destiny” is an inspirational journey taken from the pages of the Old Testament Book of Ruth. Chapter by chapter, you will be encouraged to walk with Ruth, Naomi and Boaz through great loss, tragedy and ultimately on to triumph! As you move through this story, with your Bible in hand, you will be convinced that one decision can change your entire life and destiny. You will begin to see your circumstances as set-ups, not set-backs. You will grow closer to Christ by looking at Boaz, Ruth’s kinsman-redeemer, who was a type and shadow of our Kinsman-Redeemer, Jesus. You will come to realize that God has been in your life and situations all along. He has had a plan and a purpose and there is no such thing as happenstance or coincidence. Instead you will hear God say, “I see. I know. I’m in it. I’m all over it. You are not alone.”