I'll never forget

This weekend we celebrate our daughter's eighth birthday. Back on her fourth birthday party I had to share with our group of friends just how much she had changed in two short years. All of them were new friends, none having seen our girl at the time of placement. I'll never forget that eventful summer date when she and her big brother entered our home for the first time...

Tears streamed down his face, and the sorrow she saw in him produced her own set of teardrops. They had no idea why they'd been taken away, displaced, abruptly excused from a destiny that wasn't meant to be. An assortment within a tribe, a clan, a dispersed family of sorts, jostling these two about, trying to fit them into broken lives stretched thin. All who were not incarcerated or MIA, gave their final word that Social Services could claim what was theirs, snipping the final threads of familial alliance. This case would head for permanency. The Dea home was on the top of the list. All the boxes checked for a phone call and an expected agreement for immediate placement. 

I was glad she could walk around, could manage the stairs without tumbling. But once her eyes dried, I found an emptiness there, an eerie indifference to what was taking place, to the strangers now in charge. 

Should these little ones have been better off not being born? Is the good that came not enough to replace the bad that transpired, to heal scars formed from displacement? Should any of us have been born with all the darkness, wretchedness, pain, and sorrow in this world? Not one of us can avoid parts of the ugly in this world and our own sinful flesh, including battles over what we desperately wish would go away. 

Every day I head into town, I get to admire Pike's Peak. Its snowcapped top rises majestic against the open skies, reminding me every single time that the same God who spoke those mountains into existence, created me too, setting my feet here in this world. Who am I to question who should or shouldn't live? Who am I to think the Savior of the world cannot sustain, cannot breathe new life into what was dead and empty? 

"Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has become his counselor? Or who has first given to Him and it shall be repaid to him? For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen." Romans 11:33-36