He’s wearing his red pajamas with the puppy print and chasing the dog from room to room as determinedly as the dog chases her own tail. As if by the sheer volume of his voice and desperate pitch of his pleading she will condescend to sit next to him for more than five tantalizing minutes.
She is a dog. What does she know of his story?
What does she know of the passion burning beneath his cartoon print for a four legged best friend to call his own? What does she know of three-year-old hopes that are no less intense than the thirty-year-old kind?
When we ask him what makes him special, he responds, “because I love dogs.”
He loves them and they lick his face as we all sit under blankets and the spell of an animated movie. There’s a dog in the movie and three children who are desperately waiting to get adopted. And his older brother asks, “What is adopted?”
All week they’ve been playing with their big brother Karabo who is actually my little brother, which makes him their uncle. But big brother is always what he’s been to them.
What is adopted?
And the question is so big that I pause the film and my tongue and turn to Karabo’s mom to let her explain how Karabo grew in another mommy’s tummy before he became part of our family. And I watch Jackson’s eyes grow wide with amazement that there may have been a time when Karabo had a different story than he has now and wider still when we tell him of the hundreds of kids that live in orphanages in Karabo’s home town.
But he’s old enough now to know that some children don’t have parents and to ask us the bigger questions still, like why and what can we do.
Karabo is a Setswana name meaning “an Answer.” For our family, Karabo was the answer to many questions.
For example, what can God do with the little we offer?
My parents had been moved by a particular verse in the book of James:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this:
to look after orphans and widows in their distress…” James 1:27
So, they asked a local social worker that they knew if she would introduce them to families that needed support. Families of orphans. Families known eloquently as “child-headed households.” She set up several home visits with several families. My parents planned to deliver care packages, food, clothes. They did not plan to begin an adoption journey.
But then they met the first family.
You know how the story goes. Five thousand hungry people, no food or markets in sight. One little boy, five loaves and two fish. And the rest is history.
Except that it isn’t.
Because God kept multiplying and multiplying and multiplying what my parents had set out to do. He broke their expectations and offered them back new ones, greater ones, more satisfying ones. He broke apart their plan and offered back his own and it filled up spaces in our home we didn’t know were there until our family was eventually multiplied by one little boy.
One little boy who has grown up into one big boy and his sister and now his niece and an umbilical cord connection to the orphanage they could have ended up in.
What is my story and what do I love – these are the questions that run through my mind in the midnight feedings with Zoe here in the southern hemisphere. This story of mine that finds me parenting children close in age to the second wave of kids my parents are now also parenting.
What is my story and what do I love?
My son chases his grandfather’s dog with a deep and relentless love. This is his three-year-old story. I will be thirty-seven this year. And I ask myself more here than anywhere else –here where the red dust burns my eyes and the veld burns black with winter fires. Here where my children tell me they don’t want to leave. Here where I eat and drink the flavors of home. Here where the HIV statistics sky rocket. Here where churches serve and so many kids still go desperate and hungry – what is my story?
What is my story and what will I chase with the deep and relentless love of a three-year-old who dreams of his own dog?
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Oh, how God must love your parents! Seeing them so faithful to his command surely has his heart bursting with joy. Thank you for sharing so beautifully with us.
Oh how beautiful. Thanks for sharing this.
I just pray that God heals me enough that we can care for the parentless in the near future. My heart is so heavy with the burden – it’s too much at times to not be able to take action.
oh. just oh.
What a fantastic story you tell. Well written, heart wrenching……full of hope and love and life. Well done.
Your story is so much like mine. A heart that lives in South Africa and a body that lives in England. My children (5 and 2) love everything about SA because its where we are comfortable, happy and with our loved ones. But they are safe and secure in the UK and this is the only life they know.
I guess your story is one of two halfs that are seperated by miles and miles. Sadly we belong in both and never just one of them.
Love the time you are having in SA, Love the family and the friends…there is a whole other life for you the the US as well.
H
PS – Dont forget to go to the JoBurg Zoo and if you get a chance…try the Irene Farm and Gold Reef City….
PSS – Have a packet of NikNaks for me – with a creme soda!!!!
I absolutely love this: “He broke their expectations and offered them back new ones, greater ones, more satisfying ones.”
While reading this, I’m also reminded of the story of the man on the beach throwing back one by one the starfish that had washed ashore, and the other man that says to him, “You can’t save them all, what difference does it make?” To which he replies, “It makes a difference for this one” as he tosses one in, “And this one” as he tosses another.
I only wish I could help you answer the question of what you will chase.
The older I get (I’m not far behind you!), the more I think (almost obsessively) about Story and Dreams and a peace in and a place in the Kingdom.
What beautiful telling of what is getting stirred up as you travel. Who knows but He what the next chapter will be?
What a beautiful story you have dear sister. Your story causes the water stream to flow slowly down the face. But it’s not a story of sadness, but of joy. To see the heritage that lives on in your family and to know that in all likelihood, that three year old boys story will be very similar to the legacy that they began.
One day that three year old boy will learn that his story is filled with great richness and much love.
Your pictures are very, very beautiful. So moving.
Thank you kindly for sharing your story.
What a wonderful history to share with your family!
What a beautiful story! Thank you for asking the question “what will you chase with deep and relentless love”.
your heart digs deep into the soil there, friend. i’m so glad i get to see all that’s growing out of it.
Thank you. Your story left me with more questions than answers, more restless than at peace; and I’m glad. I respect your parents for living with such compassion and honor. I pray one day to ease suffering for at least one child and give them a home too. Oh to have a heart as tenacious as a three year old!
This, THIS is what comes from serving a story-telling, story-making God. I thank God for that hunger you feel, because I know that your story is already unfolding. It’s a story of passion and commitment, of love and adventure, of wonder and struggle. It’s a story filled with joy, but also a story shaped by loss. It’s the story God is working in and through you, the story grace will tell, the story redemption will birth – is, at this very minute, already birthing. Thank you for these words, for the pictures they draw and for the pictures we see. Loving that we can discover the rest of the story with you.
a wonderful story! Thank you So much for pulling it from your heart to ours!
My dog-chasing dreams are taking our family to live in Swaziland in two years. And I pray that part of that dream will include some beautiful little faces, much darker than my very own, that also become our “second wave” of children to raise.
I’ll be passing this on!
Thank you for this — and for the phrase that really challenged me, today: “What is my story and what do I love?”
Not only in the awareness of being awake to what I love, but also in considering whether all that I love is pure and worthy of love, or whether I’m spending precious energy chasing after all the wrong “lovers”. What a gift it is to stop and consider that. Thank you. <3
You and your words and South Africa are good together. So good. And beautiful and true.
I love reading about your father and step-mom. Their faith inspired me when I first learned of Karabo and continue to inspire me as my husband and I look for own role in caring for orphans.
Thank you for sharing your beautiful family with us.