Welcome to the family, Jennifer!

Meet my new niece, Jennifer, fresh from Haiti.

Two years ago my brother and sister-in-law, Bob and Linda, fell in love with Jennifer while doing medical mission work in Haiti with their Florida church (Bob and Linda are both second-career nurses).  Their work connected them to an orphanage just outside Port au Prince where Jennifer lived.  

Bob and Linda began by sponsoring Jennifer, then felt led to adopt her.

No easy task.  Two government bureaucracies, various agencies, a birth father, language barriers and other factors created all kinds of complications.  Just when the long adoption process was getting close to completion last Tuesday’s earthquake devastated Haiti, damaged the orphanage, toppled the government office, rendered the Haitian bureaucrats and the birth father awol.  

It’s always darkest before dawn, they say, and this was the case with Jennifer’s adoption.  On Monday Bob and Linda received word that Jennifer, who had survived the earthquake unharmed, would be placed on a donated plane and would be in Florida the next day.

So yesterday, on Bob and Linda’s 19th wedding anniversary, they became parents together.  Just like that.

Bob sent these pictures tonight.  They bowl me over.  Jennifer is beautiful and I love her instantly.  

Even my brother Bob, that right-wing brother who always says up when I say down, looks pretty darned beautiful to me.

God’s real work of love does that to you.  Things that shouldn’t matter, the trivial or secondary things, no longer do.  The only thing that matters is love.  As Paul said, “the only thing that counts is faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).  I see what counts in Bob’s beautiful eyes.  

I don’t presume to know how God works.  The notion that God plucked Jennifer from the masses and left all the other orphans to fend for themselves doesn’t feel like a faithful God of love.  At the same time, I count as a God-shaped miracle the existence of an orphanage in one of the world’s poorest countries, the quick action of certain social workers, a donated plane from the US, and a man and woman in a state known for retirees playing golf instead feeling the call to step up and become parents yet again.  This scene has God’s fingerprints all over it.