Haunted

Today is our final full day in Poland and our last chance to spend time with Wiktoria for several weeks, maybe months.  However, there are a variety of emotions, different than what we expected.  It was a great week.  Today she even called Leigh mama 2 times.  We played this morning at the park, we each talked to the adoption official again through broken English, and even had a chance to take Wiktoria to the zoo.  It was a great day overall.  After the zoo, we had to take her back to the orphanage.  She is so happy there because it is all she ever knew and knows.  She does not know what a mama really is and what a dad or a family is or is supposed to look like.  She doesn’t know what it means to be tucked in bed at night.  Right now she is in a room with about a dozen cribs and it is hard to imagine that the caregivers, who do a great job, are able to give individualized attention.  She did not cry today when we left her.  She happily went to the lady working and began to play.  She doesn’t know that she is about to have a family, a big and little sister, and a forever mom and a forever dad.  Right now, all she knows are women.  How is reasonable to believe that one day she will grow up and come to learn about a Heavenly Father when she has never experienced an earthly father?
Tomorrow we fly out at 625am, having to be at the airport around 5 and getting up at 4am, making this a shorter post tonight.  We leave here knowing that Polish people do not adopt kids that are not labeled as 100% healthy.  If they are healthy, they do not stay long at the orphanage.  Tomorrow we leave this beautiful country, forever having the little faces we met burned in our memory with the realization that many of them will never have a forever family, never have the same opportunities my kids will have, or your kids will have, and grow up with all the percentages against them.  They are more likely to have addictions, be incarcerated, become a prostitute, or commit suicide.  And why?  Look in the mirror and ask that question.  Go to your church body and ask that question.  Not just for the children of Poland but for the millions of children that are orphaned both at home and abroad.  I know it’s expensive, and God has not “called” you do it.  I just can’t imagine standing face to face with God at judgment day and he asks, “Greg, what did you to defend the fatherless?”  Will I have the gumption to say, “Uh, you did not call me to do anything, so I didn’t do anything.  I did go to church every Sunday and pray and………”

So as we transition home, back to life in Cynthiana, please pray for us, for our continued efforts to raise funds, raise awareness, and for our friends and family to accept Wiktoria regardless of what they expect from her or expected her to be.  She is beautiful and looks no different in the eyes of a holy and merciful and just God than you or I do.  Jesus Christ died for every orphan, physically and spiritually.  We are striving to live as Christ, the Jesus of the Bible and not the American church Jesus.  We are haunted.