This girl, who means the world to us, turned fourteen this week.
I know it may seem like she’s my neighbor, a little girl I know, or a friend.
But we love her. Beyond words.
She is the little girl who broke her finger on our porch, with Stephen’s great idea of soaping up steps in the rain. She is the little girl who had a whole bowl of oil dumped on her head in our kitchen. She is the little girl who I imagined as a teenager {in a distant blog I cannot now locate} and now she is.
She is the little girl who was baptized this year with her father, in one of the most redemptive moments in my life. She is one of the best gifts we’ve ever gotten, and she’s not even ours.
She is this little girl…
And this one.
And now she’s this young woman who loves Jesus.
She has grown up right in front of us, right in our home, and she isn’t even ours. What a privilege to be a part of.
We love her. We love the way her family has shown so many signs of redemption over the years, and now functions, despite so many challenges, as a family. We love that we’ve been a part of witnessing it, even in the hardest things we’ve had to witness.
And so we celebrated her big, as a community and as a couple.
Extremely out of the blue on Wednesday, as I decorated her birthday cake, she asked me if we were moving back to America tomorrow. I said no, quite confusedly. She said she had heard we were moving away tomorrow, and she was visibly scared. I asked who or where this rumor had started, but reassured her we were definitely not moving tomorrow. She was so relieved.
I asked Thida about it later–had she heard this? She said no, but that Yaminoo would be so sad if we left. “She loves you so much,” she said.
Ditto.