Today we are on the first leg of our trip to Haiti...
I am a lot little nervous and way excited. We will be working in various capacities at the Hands and Feet Ministry and Orphanage for the week... so I basically get to spend my days loving on sweet kiddos! Excited and grateful is an understatement.
Matt and I have talked a lot this week about our expectations - our hearts - going into this. I spent a short time in orphanages and a refugee camp in the Czech Republic right after high school with my church... I loved my time there and walked away knowing, even more so, that I would adopt one day. But this time around, despite not being a "mother" quite yet, I feel like I'm going in with a more maternal heart. I feel it. I think it will be harder this time, for me... To look at these children and know that I could really, truly take them home with me. I am no longer a teenager or a care-free college student. I am an adult. A grown woman. I have a spouse, a home, a real-life, big-girl job. And most of all, I have the capacity in my heart to love them all the days of their lives. I do. I would love them with every fiber of my being. Perhaps I'm setting myself up for some majorly-tearful goodbyes, but it is a fact that my heart can't ignore. I could do something.
My heart is already aching for these children that I've yet to meet. I have cried big, fat tears on my drive home this week after hearing the lyrics to a new favorite song of mine.
Don't lose heart
Don't forget
This world is not our home
There's a better place where we belong
This place of heartache and strife and orphans and widows and poverty and suffering. It's not our home. Thank you for that, Lord.
Lauren
