The Windows

I don’t know what it is about the windows. There’s something about the windows there. Everytime I Skype with Bobby, Jos is looking out the windows.  Izzy and Mari spent hours at the windows. I spent hours looking out the windows in China. Mesmerized by the beauty…by the culture...by the poverty.  The windows haunt me.

The first time I saw Izzy in her sweet little diaper behind the curtains in the window my breath caught in my chest and I really felt like I couldn’t breathe.  The Lord stopped me in that moment and I saw my baby daughter looking out the window at her birth country. I wondered what she was thinking. I wondered if her mother was looking out the window somewhere wondering where she was.  Wondering if she was ok. Wondering if she was loved. It haunted me. It still does.

We stood in the same window the day we left Fuzhou and looked out over the mountains and we prayed that the Lord might let us come back one day and visit this beautiful place that gave us our daughter. It was powerful. I was amazed by His grace and the gift He had given me looking out that window at those mountains that day. I held Bobby and Izzy's hands and I begged Him to let me see those mountains again.

Little did I know that I would be in that same hotel two years later watching my two daughters play in the windows that faced the same mountains.

When I saw Izzy look out the windows…I knew that she saw what I saw. She saw  the beauty of her birth country. She loved it. She drew pagodas in her sketch book. They were amazing. I loved seeing how she interpreted what she saw. I also knew from her drawings that she saw sadness. I knew that she didn’t understand in the same way that I don’t understand this place. I knew that it was the beginning for her of the “whys”. Why did my mother abandon me? Why doesn’t my country think that I am worthy? Why? Why? Why? She looked out of those same windows that I looked out of and I'm sure she said the same thing to her heavenly father "I don't understand".

Now I wonder…what does he see when he looks out?

There is a part of me that is sad that I couldn’t be there to look out of the windows with him and at the very same time I’m grateful that I couldn’t see out of the windows. The windows that I’m sure offer such beauty. The windows that offer such poverty and suffering. The windows that if I were standing there would offer me a glimpse at the country that loved my son and the country that abandoned my son. The country that makes my heart break and the country that I'm forever indebted to and grateful for. The country that gave me this child. For this child I prayed...

Because I’m not there, I can choose to see what I want to see. This time it’s a little easier because I can choose to see this...

and this...

This time the windows don’t haunt me. This time the windows bring me joy.