True, pure love...

Have you ever felt this: when you are sitting in a room with a lot of people, when all of a sudden the hair on your arms stand up, you get goosebumps all over, and it feels as if time stops?  And when time begins again, you feel deja-vu or that the Holy Spirit has entered the room.  A surreal type of feeling?  And it is as if you, yourself are holding the waves of emotions behind your two eyelids....

This weekend I went to Indianapolis again.  It seems I go there every 4 months or so.  This time it was for our adoption agency's picnic.  And we saw lots of our friend's and their children from Ethiopia.  But I was waiting and waiting for this family to come.  Remember this post?!  Well it was the first time I was going to see them since we arrived back from Ethiopia.  And I would finally have Yohanna in my arms.  We waited all day and finally they got there, but it was time for us to go back home.  So we made a decision to stay another night.  Somehow we ended up on the same fifth floor with rooms across the hall from each other.  Several hours later all of a sudden that feeling hit me.  The kids were eating while watching Cartoon Network.  And then time stopped.  And I realized right then, that all our prayers had came to fruition.

We had spent many months praying and crying over these two children.  And here they both are together, in a hotel room watching cartoon network, sharing a cookie, on a different continent, in a different state that neither of us live in.  Surreal....They are both from the same town, the same orphanage.  He was there the day they brought her in.  He was there when they gave her her first bath.  He was there when they fed her Plumpy Nut.  He was there while they rocked her.  He was there when they fed her.  He was there when she was no longer than the length of two bars of soap.  He was there when they stopped her tears.  He was there as they willed her to live.  It wasn't me, or my husband, or our family, but it was him, this little boy...He was there...And here he was again, so very far away, now both with two complete different lives, but still  from that small little orphanage, still brought together by God...

We asked him if he remembered her, and he nodded his head yes.  But I wanted to make sure.  So we proceeded to show him pictures of her when she was with him in this small orphanage.  Yes he remembered that baby in those pictures.  And when he realized that that baby in those pictures was her, I witnessed something I had only seen once before.  Love.  True, pure, love when the older boys at the orphanage had shown this type of fatherly love to the younger children there.  It had made me fall in love with the older boys.  And here it was happening in front of my very eyes.  In a tiny hotel room, in a different state.  Love.  As I watched him share his food with her, I must say it was hard not to cry.  As I heard him ask to hold her, it was hard not to cry.  And as I watched them just be two people from the same town, several months back, when they experienced the same things, it made my heart grow.  Love.  True, pure, love...

And it reminded me why I love God.  Because He sends us people to be in our lives forever.  Not just for a small moment in time, but forever.  And as I smiled with the background sounds of cartoons playing, I realized God was sitting on that bed with those two former Ethiopian orphans, just like always.  I just was finally able to actually see His true, pure, love...