Beautiful Feet - Ethiopia

Impossible

Tuesday

There are absolutely no words to tell you how amazing God was today, and yet I will probably type pages telling you the story.  A little background is in order first.

The last Hope for His Children big group trip was in January of 2012.  That trip was my second trip, and Dave and the kids joined me, so they all had their first HfHC mission trip.  We worked at CFI every morning, just as we are this week.  Working with the kids for half a day, five days in a row, gives you a real sense of their personalities and helps you remember their names and faces.  You learn something of their stories.  You take their pictures.  You pray for them.  You think about them when you’re home. 

I returned to Ethiopia with Hope for His Children this past October.  The fall trip was a small group trip – only 4 people.  As I prepared for that trip, I got a text from Michelle.  It was a photo of a precious Ethiopian face that I remembered – a young boy with his mother.  The message on that September 22nd was devastating:  “Please pray for Anatolee and his mother!!!!  Anatolee is 5 and has been missing for several days . . . his mother (Dirribe) has tried everything and is devastated.”  My response:  “I can’t breathe, let alone form a thought.”

When you work with these kids, you come to know that all of them are one small event away from devastation, enormous loss, or even death.  Anatolee’s mother had gone to work and come home to find her son missing.  No trace.  No evidence.  No indication whatsoever as to what might have happened.  There were guesses, speculation.  It was rainy season.  Perhaps he fell in the river near their home.  Maybe someone stole him.  Unspoken, between the two, we hoped for the river.  Apparently, (we learned just this week) the local government accused her of sending him off to the countryside, something that sometimes happens when parents can no longer support their children in the city.  They threatened to arrest her.  Can you imagine?

We travelled to Addis in October and found no developments, no new information.  Hope was fading.  It’s a helpless feeling to know that there is nothing you can do.  We prayed.  We prayed upon receiving the news.  We prayed in our nightly family time.  We prayed individually.  We asked everyone we knew to pray.  Days had passed into weeks, and weeks passed into months.  As we approached this current trip, we had sadness:  Anatolee wouldn’t be there.  We’ve talked about him this week.  There’s an empty space knowing he’s missing.  Someone even pulled out Anatolee’s bio sheet from the HfHC files this morning and read his story. 

Back to today.  The morning was spent at CFI.  More manicures, more Bible stories, more crafts.  More laughter.  Time spent at the soccer field in recreation.  Lunch back at the guest house.  Then we went to the government orphanage. 

Last year’s visit to the government orphanage is recorded in an earlier entry.  I confess, I did not want to go.  I was filled with a sense of dread.  I say again - visiting that place is a shattering experience.  As we pulled into the gates of the compound, my insides were strung taut.  We walked in the front door, and I wanted to run.   A couple of men were sitting on a bench outside the director’s office.  A woman was sitting on a bench beside the door.  A worker came down and spoke to her.  While we waited for the director, that worker came back carrying a small child which she handed to the woman sitting by the door.  We spoke with the director for a short while, and then began a tour of the facility.  As we exited the director’s office, I saw the woman by the door holding that small boy, stroking his face, kissing him, and talking to him.  He was talking back to her.  I couldn’t help but wonder.  Was she relinquishing her son?  Were we witnessing a farewell? 

As we walked up the stairs to the baby rooms, I resolved that I was not going to be a hot mess this time.  I decided to smile in each tiny face, stroke each soft cheek, coo and talk and love on them like crazy.  And I did.  I won’t deny my heart broke, and I definitely shed tears, but I loved on babies and small children, smiled, and touched them tenderly. We moved from empty bunk rooms, to the baby rooms, to the special needs rooms.  We walked by one room where one nurse sat on a small stool feeding one toddler.  A tray of bowls sat in front of her.  On the floor behind the eating child was a semicircle of quietly waiting toddlers.  There was something heartbreaking about that little circle.  Some of our group stopped to help feed the waiting ones.  Finally, we proceeded to an open area between two buildings where elementary aged kids were playing. 

Every member of our group was soon engaged with the kids.  They had some kind of animal cards, and several of us were involved in sharing the English word for each animal and trying to learn the Amharic name.  Some played counting games.  I heard Nathan saying to a small group of kids, “Show me your foot.”  He waited to see if they understood the English and could find the right body part.  A couple looked around, unsure, until Nathan said to Elizabeth, “Show me your foot,” and she demonstrated.  After that, they did well, until “stomach”!  A young girl I guessed to be about 7 came up and held my hand.  I asked her name, told her mine, and stood still as she wrapped her arms around me.  For at least 15 minutes we stood together without saying anything.  I wrapped my arms around her, stroked her cheeks, her hair, her ears.  I squeezed her tight.  We swayed slowly for a while.  Every once in a while, she’d look up at me and smile.  Tears fell silently as I thought with profound conviction, “Every child needs a momma.”  I wondered if she’d ever have one. 

As I stood with this precious child of God, I heard Michelle calling my name.  I looked up to find a shocked look on her face and tears streaming down her face.  She said something I couldn’t understand.  It looked at if something was terribly wrong, and I began to move toward her, pulling my sweet girl along with me.  As I approached her, Michelle said, “This is Anatolee!!”  “What?!!”  I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying.  “This is ANATOLEE!”  Electricity ran through my whole body, and everything moved slowly.  “What?!”  She looked at me with utter shock, eyes wide, tears pouring.  She pointed.  I saw Peter kneeling and weeping, ever so briefly, in front of a small boy.  He stood up, then bent over, looking into the boy’s face, quietly asking him questions.  I looked back at Michelle.  Again, “It’s Anatolee!”  Once more regarding this boy, I couldn’t form a thought.  How on earth could that be?  How?  He’d been missing for months.  How’d he get here?!  All I could think to say was “Are you sure?”  Michelle asked Peter, “Are you sure?”  “Yes” came Peter’s reply. 

Somehow, a 6 year old boy had wandered away from home on a September afternoon, been taken to a police station, and then transferred to the government orphanage.  On a March afternoon, as Peter stood in the yard of that orphanage, that boy saw Peter wearing a CFI t-shirt.  He walked up to Peter, grabbed the t-shirt where the logo was on the chest, and said, “That’s my school!”  Michelle said Peter looked down at the boy and then said, “An . . . , Ana . . . .”  He couldn’t even get the name out.  Finally, “Anatolee . . .?!”  A nodded reply affirmed he had gotten it right.  Several questions later, while shouts went out to various team members of “It’s Anatolee!  It’s Anatolee!”, it was clear Anatolee had been found.  We sobbed with joy.  We looked at each other dumbfounded.  We kept shaking our heads.  Nothing terrible had happened.  Something unbelievably wonderful had happened! I said to more than one person, “This is impossible!”  Michelle, Peter, and Anatolee were off to the director’s office.  The director herself couldn’t believe it.  Nothing like this had ever happened there before. 

After conversation with the director, the pulling of Anatolee’s file, more questions and conversation with Anatolee, we had to go.  I have no idea how long we’d been there.  The hardest part of all was leaving Anatolee at the orphanage.  He had to be claimed by his mother.  Initially, when Peter told him what was going on and that he had to stay and Peter said goodbye, Anatolee turned and walked back into the orphanage.  I was the last one of our group out of the building, and I watched him go.  I saw another boy reach out to him, and Anatolee turned and scowled heavily at him and kept walking.  However, after we loaded into our vans, we noticed him standing on the front porch of the orphanage, watching us go.  He smiled. 

Can you imagine?

We talked a whole lot on the way back to the guest house about God’s sovereignty and His goodness.  A million details had to be coordinated for us to be in that place, in that very yard, at that precise time, when Anatolee was walking through, with Peter in that CFI t-shirt.  God orchestrated each one perfectly.  Initially, we weren’t even sure which day we were going to the orphanage.  God chose Tuesday.  We were supposed to leave the orphanage by 5.  By God’s sovereignty, we were still there at 5:10, because our driver was running an errand for us.  Our driver was actually out buying children’s Bibles for us, because in God’s utter wisdom, one of our bags had been lost on the flight or stolen from baggage claim, and the gifts we had brought for the 70 CFI kids were gone.  By the grace of God, even though he was running late to meet us for the orphanage trip, Peter had stopped on his way out to change his t-shirt.  In fact, he’d gotten all the way outside his house and then went back in to put on a clean one, a CFI one.  God’s hand was on every detail, weaving perfectly, so that a lost little boy could be found.

I don’t know what else happened.  I just know that God is amazing, all-powerful, sovereign, faithful and merciful.  He loves tenderly and passionately, and His hand is truly on the smallest sparrows.  He worked an absolute miracle today, and we got to see it.  Can you imagine?

When Gabriel told a young girl named Mary that she was going to have a baby even though she was a virgin, she said, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”  (Luke 1:38)  Amen and Amen.  Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”  (Matthew 18:26)  Indeed.  Today we saw the impossible.  It was utterly, completely glorious. 

By the way, as we left the orphanage, the woman was still cradling that little boy on the bench.  I’m praying for more of the impossible.