What Can I Do With All This Love?

My husband and I began sponsoring ten year old ‘K’ through Children’s Hopechest in the Spring of 2009. When we travelled to Ethiopia to bring home our two children the following year, meeting him was a definite pit stop on my tourist schedule of Ethiopia. We spent several days visiting K’s school, care center and seeing an entirely different side to the city of Addis Ababa and the unique challenges faced by children who are in abject poverty. It was the most rewarding and heart twisting weeks of my life. I looked down and my heart was gone. It was know being carried by a tiny stature of a boy who was suddenly latched to my hand and calling me “mama.” It was second nature for me to call him “son.”

K didn’t steal my heart; I gave it the first day I threw my arms around him. I cried from the minute we got in the cab to head home. How could I have been so arrogant to believe that I would travel across the world, meet a child I only knew in letters and not be forever changed by that? Being home with a two and six year old proved distracting enough, but I couldn’t shake my time with K. I knew that our lives intersected for a special purpose and I wanted to know what more I could do to use that love and engage further in advocacy, orphan care and adoption.

As my husband and I discussed our options, we contacted our agency about adopting K. Adoption was the only language I was speaking in response to what I had seen in Ethiopia. When our adoption agency called us back and advised that K was unadoptable because he was living with his grandmother, I was actually crushed. My mama instinct kicked in and I kept arguing with myself that while he was still in his home country and surrounded by his culture, he didn’t have a mother. And I felt I was the only person who could fill that role for him. Selfishly, I wanted K here, in our home, in my reality of every day life, but God began convicting my heart and asking me to question if I wanted K here for my glory or if I wanted God to be glorified. OUCH!

With prayerful consideration and laying down my dreams, I asked what would most glorify God and continue to share my love for orphans, adoption and missions. I wrote a children’s book about a little boy who walks each day for water in Africa and when I went to meet the illustrator, he asked me if I had suggestions for the look of the main character. I laughed. No. I didn’t have suggestions; I only saw one face when I wrote the book; K’s. The book, “I Walk for Water”, will be released on June 12, 2011, which not coincidently, is K’s 12th birthday. This fall, I will travel to Ethiopia to read the book to K in person and in public for the first time. He has no idea. We’ll be taking a documentary crew along to film the event and hopefully within the next year, K and I’s story will become a video journey of how one love can inspire another, and perhaps change the world.

The project has been such an amazing collaboration of love and fun, we’ve started our own publishing company. Hilarity Waters Press is a collaboration of artisans who refine education through stories and see those stories to life through art, illustration and imagination in order to bring about social and global change. A portion of the proceeds from “I Walk for Water” will be donated to Water Is Life, a non-profit known internationally for its ability to provide life giving water solutions. We will also offer wholesale pricing for individuals and organizations who want to use the book as fundraising for adoption, orphan care and/or missions.

Our journey with K is definitely ANYTHING but over. I would have never thought that God would have used a picture that sat on my desk to completely change my views on adoption, orphan care, and mothering from across the globe. His ways are so much more beautiful than we would know and while I am still standing ready to bring that little boy if it is His will; I am resolute that it must be HIS will and not mine, my family’s or K’s.

So while you are searching your heart for “what can I do with all this love?”, use the talents God has already given you and give it back to Him. Guest: Lindsey Andrews