Care Package

The frenzy has ceased. The days of activity to drive forward a blizzard of paperwork, sent around the world to secure a child, have stopped. All the documents that ordain what we hope the Lord has already decreed are now in their rightful place.


In America, government employees will sift through our most personal moments as a family as they read our home study, then validate birth certificates and marriage license, and do their best to protect both a little child and a large nation. Will they find us, once again, suitable parents for a foreign orphan?


In China, equally serious government employees will begin to match the paperwork of an orphaned little boy with that of a family who has a child-sized hole in its heart. They too, will read, in their beautiful Chinese language, the translated story of our family ~ our hopes and dreams, our failures. And they will do their best for their native son.


Our paperwork is now up to date. All that we can do, as the panic-attack provoking stacks of documents find sanctuary in their rightful homes, far from our dining room table, is wait.


The day our last document was sent, we put a care package in the mail to Jackson. How terribly strange. Nothing says loving like…we were at a loss. Can any of it make sense to a precious child whose world is upside down? Can he look at our pictures, painstakingly labeled with the Chinese words for Mama, Daddy, Big Sister, Big Brother, and not feel fear? What must he think? Can he know that those photographs represent safety and love and home? That laughter fills our hearts, not just our “picture faces”? That our home is filled with joy, and books, and toys, and warm meals, and cool drinks, and security?

How do you say “We love you” in a box? Will he get to snuggle under that warm blanket? Will he get to wrap his little fingers around those cars and whiz them with glee down a clean stretch of floor somewhere on the other side of the earth?

Can he know the love his sister felt when she chose that bear? Will the other children treat him better or worse for the knowledge that someone is coming for him? Will he be better cared for by the orphanage nannies because he is going “home”? Will those Twix bars buy him favor? You do what you must.

One day we will tell him.  We will tell him how much we fussed over those gifts, and prayed that somehow they would say “We love you”.

We will tell him about the faithful Ruth in China, whom we have never met, yet who was willing to translate our letter for us, because she is a believer and because she works with believers who are pouring out their lives as a drink offering to care for “the least of these” in Pingdingshan. We will tell him that every hope for him, every prayer for him, every ache to hold him and make things right were sealed up in that box. Sent to him across the planet. Because even though we can’t get to him, that box can. And it can carry to him all the love that we cannot take him.

Yet.