followup

After posting our new photo of K quickly in my excitement over seeing our boy, I realized how my attitude could come across as almost flippant. There has been a post outlined in my mind for weeks that I think needs to actually come out in words tonight.

My joy over seeing this boy I have grown to love sees past the bars of his crib and sees only for the sweet child with the big dark eyes behind those bars. But what is so striking as I step back is how very prominent the bars are - this cage that this boy has been kept in for so many long years. And for what crime? The same crime that so many many people in this world have committed - he is less than perfect. A world that defines a person's value by their beauty, and ability does not value brokenness. Brokenness is something to be hidden, covered up at all costs. The world inflicts serious consequences on those who can not hide their brokenness. One of those consequences is to hide them away in institutions where those on the outside never have to know that they exist, never have to look at them, never have to learn to love outside of what may be gained for oneself...and never have to face their own brokenness.

It would be easy to look disparagingly at the society that lets this happen to children, or at least at this particular institution (because K's country, to their credit, when they learned what had been happening for many long years to these children, took action to replace leadership and attempt to improve conditions for these children), but that would not be an accurate picture. Our older daughter commented angrily to me one day about what awful people K's birth parents must have to do this to their child. This anger is a natural reaction, I believe. What we see here in this precious little boy, and in so many many others who have lived under the same conditions for their whole lives, is just symptomatic of a much deeper far-reaching problem. But what I had to tell my daughter is that we ought not be so quick to place judgement on his birth parents. They may have been told they had no choice. They likely had not ever seen anyone raise a child with a severe handicap at home and may have even believed this was "best" for him. We don't know. I told my daughter that this is what selfishness looks like. This happens not merely because one person does an awful horrid thing, but because SIN is in the world. This is not a problem merely of his society, or his parents, or this institution, but it is much deeper than that - it is the problem of sin: of self-worship instead of a God-driven, God-empowered love for others above ourselves.

Because every society has their way of dealing with these kinds of imperfection; we have different ways of doing it, but they are all ugly. In K's country, children with handicaps are institutionalized. In ours, we simply kill many of them before they are born. The statistic that 90% of babies with down syndrome in the United States are aborted is horrifying to me. Our society has no right to judge K's for their treatment of children. K, for what it's worth (and I think it's worth plenty!) is alive and although he doesn't know it, his mommy and daddy have been working for months to jump through the hoops that will bring him home after what will have been over nine years of his "sentence" and in eleven days he is going to get to meet them for the first time, and even though he will not realize it even then, his life will never be the same! This boy is alive, and being redeemed, and will be able to spend the rest of his life as part of a family who loves him.

Matt has said many times how he's glad that he's going to be able to travel with me on this first trip. One reason, obviously, is to get to meet his son! But the other one he's mentioned a number of times: he believes that God is going to show us things over these 10 days that will change us forever. It's one thing to know things like this happen, and another to see it with your own eyes.