I think
my heart broke a little this morning.
Becky has
wanted to care for orphans in Romania for about as long as she’s been in
Romania (which is the early 1990s). She
initially wanted to take in infants, but received older children. Some have come and gone because they couldn’t
stand the “tough love” or the discipline/chastisement that comes with being
under a parental authority. Some have
made their home at Casa Shalom because they’ve been reconciled with their
family, praise God!
Casa
Shalom, despite caring for and housing orphans through the years, never
official became an orphanage. The
government’s laws and regulations continued (continues?) to hinder her from
running a Christian orphanage that would be financially feasible for Becky to
operate. Ultimately these roadblocks
have changed the direction of Casa Shalom – we now hope to see this place
become a retreat/conference center.
This
place, which truly lives up to its name, is in transition. Namely, the two remaining orphans, Marius and
Catalin, both eleven years old, will have to move to different orphanages soon.
We’ve
half-joked about putting them into our packs and taking them with us,
persuading our families to adopt them, lamenting that if we were older, we’d
adopt them (and by we, I refer to myself).
Then this
morning as we (Lunchbox) met to pray, we found out that Marius would be leaving
as soon as Friday. And that he can’t be
adopted outside of Romania. And of
course, should we follow through with stuffing him in our backpacks, we could
possibly be charged with kidnapping.
If you
got to meet Marius, you’d also be confused as to why attempts to reconcile him
to his family didn’t work.
He’s
quite friendly: right away, he introduced himself to me, shaking my hand. He loves to play soccer and basketball, and
sometimes tennis, but mostly soccer and basketball. And he loves to sing; I noticed the slight
vibrato in his voice during praise.
He’s
always helpful in the kitchen, setting the table and cleaning up. And the way he played with two pre-school age
girls – helping them on the swings and the other thing that spins – exuded
sweetness and kindness. He gets motion
sick, I learned; he told me, as he spun the thing, but not too fast, that if he
sits on the-spinning-thing-I-don’t-know-the-name-of, he will “vom.” Hahaha.
Anyway,
the story of how the second, and seemingly final, attempt of reconciliation
made me sad and angry, but mostly sad. “Don’t you know how precious he is?!” I want to scream at his father. And then I want to tell him, “You don’t
deserve him, anyway.”
So,
within a few days, he will be living in a new place, meeting new people, away
from the house and friends he’s known for eight years, which is a considerable
chunk of his lifetime. His “real” family
won’t receive him and this family, who cherishes him and wants to keep him,
can’t. I’m sure there are families
outside of Romania who’d be thrilled with the idea of a Marius, but he’s not
available to them.
And it
sucks. It sucks enough that, as he sauntered through the dining room during breakfast, greeting us, I had to avert my
eyes and fix them on my recently empty bowl of cereal instead to keep from crying.
Until
this afternoon, I didn’t know how exactly to pray about all this. There was just this big “I dunno” on my
heart. Good ol’ J-Rod came to the rescue
with the idea of praying against a spirit of rejection over Marius before he
goes; for in God’s eyes, Marius has never been an orphan.
And I
remember, too, now, that in all things, God works for the good of those who
love Him (Romans 8:28). So while I don’t
know much, what I do know is enough.
