Will Jubilee come running into our arms with a big smile on her face? Unlikely. She doesn't know us at all. Her home is the orphanage. It is the only life she has ever known. She has never seen a man with a scruffy face (Asian men typically can't grow beards, though I am open to correction, Alex and Phom). We will smell different to her. We will speak a foreign language. We don't even have Mandarin in common with her, as she is from a Cantonese-speaking region. She might scream for 45 minutes, as was our friends' experience when they picked up their daughter last week. Their daughter cried and cried, reaching for the door through which her caregiver had left her with her new parents, inconsolable and stricken with grief. Allow me to share an excerpt from this friend's blog; it just rings too loudly with truth not to.
"I’m so thankful that G0D gave me patience and perspective to have compassion for her during those first few hours. Her tears and temporary rejection didn’t hurt, because I knew something she didn’t know: it may have seemed like the end of the world to her, but I knew that it was going to get better, for all of us. At that moment, all she wanted was to go back to the orphanage and to the life she knew. I couldn’t and wouldn’t let her have what she so desperately wanted, but what I could do was to hold her, wipe away her tears, and pray for her. It must be how G0D sees things when we’re desperate for something and aching for what our hearts have set our sights on. He won’t let us have what we want sometimes, knowing that it’s not the best, but He is near to the brokenhearted and can whisper to us, 'You can’t have that, but what I have planned for you is so much better.'” -Sung McClure
