hope, hearts, and haunting eyes

On this Valentine's day, I'm reminded that pieces of my heart lay in cribs halfway across the world.

There are 3 babies in particular that I do not think will ever leave my mind. I don't remember their names, but oh do I remember their faces.

The first was a little guy with a head full of hair. I don't know what his disability was, but I knew he was different before they even told me he was 'delayed'. But he was oh so sweet, with the biggest smile. He loved to be kissed and loved.

The second was a blonde baby with piercing blue eyes. He looked at me from across the room as I held another baby, laying with his bottom in the air as many babies do. He just looked. Never cried. Never laughed. But when I picked him up...oh my heart...he just snuggled right into me, so enjoying the contact, the love.

The last is the one I remember the most, the one that is almost haunting. I held him as I was also holding 2 other babies (I'm a very skilled baby-holder.). He just looked at me. Huge brown eyes. Begging me, pleading with me not to put him back in his crib, to please take him away, take him to someone who loved him. I see those eyes often, begging me not to go.

In that moment, I knew I had to return. This wasn't a one-time trip. A piece of my heart went back into that crip. And still remains with those haunting brown eyes, begging for love, for rescue. I can't rescue him. But I myself have been rescued and am loved without condition. And this is why I must go back. To carry love and hope of rescue for those brown eyes. So he will know that he is loved and worthy of rescue.

Please take just a few minutes today to pray for these sweet babies, and the over 147 million orphans in our world today. That's a really big number. 147 souls who may not feel love on this day of love. Pray for hearts to be opened. For people to come forth and claim these sweet children as their own, rescuing them as we were rescued by Christ. Pray for the governments to learn to value these children, encouraging people to adopt them. And pray that these sweet babies feel loved today.

i left my heart in romaina

i started this blog just over a year ago, with the intentions of sharing my heart. it quickly turned in to sharing about my trip to Romania. the trip was amazing. incredible. i could write for days about it. you can read the team blog from last year here.

after just 1 week in this incredible country, i was completely smitten. with the people, with the culture, with what my God was doing there. i missed my family and friends a lot, but i wasn't ready to leave when the time came. while we were there, we got to spend time in the abandoned baby ward of the hospital. while the whole trip was incredibly meaningful to me, i think i left my heart in that abandoned baby ward. we just held babies for 4 hours. i would hold three babies in my arms, and be talking to another one. i can't wait to get back there, to hold those sweet babies, to show them that they're loved and worth it.

that being said, i jumped at the opportunity to head back to romaina this summer. the trip costs $3000, which means a LOT of fundraising! now, reading this you may be thinking, "Rachel, I don't really have $50 or $100 to give you!"

but I'm not asking you for that. i'm asking you to consider sponsoring me in a 5K I will be running in next month. a 5K is around 3 miles, so you can sponsor me per mile. For example, you could sponsor me at $5 per mile, which would be $15 for the whole race. Any and all amounts would be GREATLY appreciated!!

you can even donate online! go to this website and look for the PayPal donate link on the right hand side of the page. just make sure you put my name in the information section! if you have questions about the trip, please feel free to email me!

European Adventures -- Installment One: Atlanta and Brussels

It's nearing the end of July, which means that we have been back from Europe fr almost two months. I've debated for nearly two months what I wanted to write in a blog post about the trip. It's a beautiful (albeit HOT) Sunday afternoon, and this is my attempt at being open and honest and REAL about the trip.

We began our journey on Monday, May 16th. Our flight was to leave somewhere around 7pm, to Boston. Once in Boston, we would board a flight to Paris. Weeelll. We hadn't even left the Atlanta airport before our "plans" got messed up. There was apparently bad weather in Boston, so our flight was delayed. All 18 of us ventured over to the International Rebooking desk and Richard got to working his magic with Miss Margaret. After a couple of hours of standing around the desk (a few games of Ninja took place, as well as some great bonding time), we had 18 standby tickets for a flight directly to Paris. Now, I'm not sure if you've ever flown standby, but it's hard enough to get one person on the flight they want. But we were all believing in our awesome God and trusting that we would all make it on that flight. We still had several hours before we could even get in line and try to fly standby, so we settled in to make the best of it. We then found out that we would be getting two vouchers for free food in the ATL airport. Some of us had already eaten dinner, but we could use them to get water bottles or other treats for the flight. Then it came time to attempt to fly standby. Now, remember Miss Margaret? Well, most people that came to her desk were pretty rude with her. But we knew God was for us, so we were very patient in our waiting. So she quite liked us. When it was time to try and fly standby, she came and got us to the front of the line, and -- are you ready for this?? -- ALL 18 of us got on that flight. Directly to Paris! We didn't even have to have a layover! So we all settled in for our overseas flight.

We arrived in Paris in the morning.

Our luggage did not.

Everyone was surprisingly calm about the whole situation though. As it turns out, our luggage made the journey to Boston first. AirFrance gave us little toiletry packages, and would reimburse us for up to 100 Euros for "necessities."

Because of the flight mixups, we'd missed our train to Brussels. But by this point, no one was too concerned. We (of course) got the train situation settled, and spent the afternoon in the train station in Paris. We got our first taste of Parisian food, and quickly realized that NOTHING in Europe is free -- I spent over a Euro just to pee in the train station!

We caught the last train to Brussels, and arrived there late at night. EuroBrad and EuroDale met us at the train station and drove us to CTS (Continental Theological Seminary), where we would be staying for the next few days.

We got our first taste of European driving (which only got crazier as we travelled East!) The girls at CTS had collected toiletries for us, and we were SO thankful for that! They even gave us little laundry sheets so we could wash our clothes in the sink.

The days at CTS were a bit of a blur, but I will share what I can remember. We spent our first day touring Brussels, and it was absolutely GORGEOUS! I've spent most of my school career hearing about Europe and the wars there and such, but this city was absolutely filled with history. There were buildings there that are older than our country.

This was also my first real experience not knowing the language. I took a few years of French (they speak French in Belgium) in middle and high school, but the best I remembered was "Parlez-vous Anglais?" (I'm not even sure I spelled that correctly.) That got me pretty far, as most people spoke English. However, when it came time for us to order our Belgian waffles (you can't go to Belgium without having a Belgian waffle!), the vendor didn't speak much English. There was a lot of pointing and gesturing involved. And let me tell you, a Belgian waffle is not just a thick waffle. It's a dessert -- covered in chocolate and cream. MMMMM.

We spent the next few days at CTS learning about European culture. We got to hear from a man named Joseph, who spent his first 30 years in Communist Bulgaria -- he wasn't allowed to leave the country during the communist reign! It was absolutely remarkable, and his unwavering faith was incredible. He had a lot of good things to tell us about what Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, was like both during Communism as well as now. He gave us a little bit more understanding as to what we might encounter in Romania, and how it would be different from what we were experiencing in Belgium. 

The Romania team also got to speak with a girl who was writing her thesis on Reactive-Attachment Disorder (RADs). Many children who grow up in orphanages experience this, and she gave us a lot of good insight about what we could possibly expect in the children we encountered. 

Finally the day came to say goodbye to the Berlin team:

The wonderful GSU team in front of CTS.

I don't know about the other girls, but from the standpoint of the girls of the GSU team, we were a little nervous at this point. We'd been doing all this fundraising and praying and preparing for this trip with Mark and Richard for several months now, and suddenly they were off to Berlin. But our nervousness was soon pushed aside by our excitement to head to Romania. We just barely made our flight to Bucharest, and boarded a plane filled with excitement and nervousness about what God had in store for us for the next 7 days. 

Love will find a way.

At least once a week I find myself on the Reece's Rainbow website. I will spend hours looking at all the sweet faces on there, praying that each of them finds a home SOON. 


Over the past five years, RR has found homes for over 500 orphans! This is wonderful news. However, hundreds more still need a home. 


Some of them never found a home. 
Never knew the love of a family. 
The warmth of a hug. 
The feeling of being loved and wanted and worth it.
Everyone deserves to know that they are worth it. 


Many people say, "Well why don't you just adopt a child with Down Syndrome (or other special needs) from the US?"


Well in our wonderful, technologically advanced society, a woman can have her baby tested for DS while still in utero. And when the test comes back positive, 90% abort. 


90 percent. 


What is it about finding out your child might be "different" that makes a woman want to give up that pregnancy?


There are so many myths about DS that it is impossible to list them all, but people with DS live wonderful lives these days. 


They have jobs. 

They fall in love and get married. This couple is Monica and David. If you haven't seen their documentary, you should most definitely check it out!

They just happen to have an extra chromosome. 

A very cute chromosome. 

And last but not least, this is my friend Dan Drinker. You should go check out his website. 

So back to Reece's Rainbow. 

Everyone deserves a home where they feel loved. 

I'm believing in a God who saves. 

I'm believing that every one of those children will find a family. Before it's too late. 

And you can help. 

Yes. YOU. 

I'm not so interested in hearing how you're a college student or you have no money or what not. 

We can all help. 

Maybe you have a few extra dollars to donate. 

Maybe you're being called to adopt one of these sweet faces. 

Or maybe you're called to pray for them. 

Any of these is wonderful. 

Please. 

Let's not let any more of these children die without a family. 

Updates on my Reece's Rainbow babies

Nicholas is almost 9 years old, and has already been transferred to an institution. 

An institution. Like this:

Or this:

Unless someone adopts him soon, that is where he will remain. With no one to love him and tell him how much he is loved. How much our God loves him. Pray he finds his forever family soon. Know someone looking to adopt? Direct them here. 

And then there's Alexandria. Wellll....as it turns out, AlexandRIA is actually AlexandER. 

Absolutely precious either way. (It's not uncommon for girls to be dressed in boy clothes and vice versa in an orphanage like so.) Alexander is almost 3. He desperately needs to be adopted as well. He could so greatly benefit from things like physical therapy that could be provided for him here, but not where he is now. Pray he finds his forever family soon. Know someone looking to adopt? Direct them here. 

And here's my newest angel! Introducing Danielle:

Danielle is almost 8. She has ALREADY BEEN TRANSFERRED to an institution. Her time is running out. After a certain age, they will no longer allow her to be adopted. So she will live in a place like this:

Living in a single bed, rarely taken out, for the remainder of her life. Pray she finds her forever family soon. Know someone looking to adopt? Direct them here. 

So pray and believe with me that they will find their homes this year. Find them SOON. Their time is running out. 

Love

This is an interview Chris Stedman did with Derek Webb. I absolutely love Derek Webb, even more so now. I think this is very well said. I copied and pasted the article from The Huffington Post, but I've highlighted some of my favorite parts. The bold parts are Chris, the others are Derek. I'm not posting this to start a heated discussion or anything of that sort. Just to share. If you have commentary, please, by all means leave it. 

Derek Webb isn't your prototypical evangelical Christian -- but he hopes that someday, he might be.

A long-time darling of the contemporary Christian music scene, Webb has flirted with controversy a number of times since launching his solo career, most notably with his 2009 album Stockholm Syndrome and its lead single "What Matters More," which found him openly addressing homophobia in the Christian church.

Given his willingness to reach across dividing lines, I asked Webb about his religious identity and how it relates to his work and his positions on issues relating to LGBT people, Muslims and atheists.

Tracking the arc of your career, it seems to me that you've become increasingly vocal about your opinions on certain social issues. What's behind that?

My wife and I are both artists. Part of the luxury of being an artist is that you not only can but kind of have a responsibility to think long and hard about things on behalf of those who might listen to your music. You can give them a jumping off point for subject matter that might be too tangled for most people in the busyness of their daily lives. I think there are a lot of smart people out there who honestly just don't have the time to think through some of these issues, and it becomes easier to watch CNN, to watch Fox News, to read some random blog and just get your answers and talking points from those kinds of places.

Sometimes all people need is a little shove, and I feel like artists can play a really unique role by taking advantage of the luxury of being able to think through these issues of culture and life and then distill those thoughts down into just a couple minutes, put a little melody with it -- something to help the medicine go down -- and give people something to react to, [so] that they might begin to form their own opinions.

What was the reaction to "What Matters More" and, more largely, Stockholm Syndrome? Were you concerned about the risk of taking a stand on such a heated issue?

It was honestly pretty predictable. The part of it that I didn't really expect was the response from those that are at the business end of the church's judgment, especially around the gay issue. But what was surprising in a good way -- what showed me that I picked the right kind of trouble to get into -- was the response from a lot of people who were really struggling spiritually because they had no language for being who they actually were and believing what they actually believed. For their whole lives they had people telling them they couldn't be a certain kind of person. I was really gratified to be able to provide some small bit of sanity to a handful of people. That was worth whatever judgment or misunderstanding that might've come from the record itself.

In terms of my being fearful or not [about the] reaction; I take my job really seriously, and I have tried to make a habit over the years of not listening to people who either criticize me or praise me. Spirituality is a really mysterious thing, and I feel as though I have received various coordinates from God over the years in terms of what I need to be spending my time and my work on, and that's really what I'm listening to. If following faithfully along those coordinates puts me in a season of praise with a certain group of people, that's fine -- but I don't do it to get in those graces, and neither am I upset if that also costs me some people along the road. I would much rather be faithful than successful, and I think that's a real professional difference [from] how some people do it.

How do you think the Christian community can build bridges to the LGBT community?

Initially, Christians can stop pretending that they're so different. I think there would be an immediate change in the conversation if we all realized how similar we are and the common language we share.

Another thing that would really change the conversation between the church and the broader gay community -- and it so desperately needs changing -- is the church's response. The church has spent so many years dealing publicly in the morality of the issue, in a way that misrepresents the response that I believe Jesus would have, that Christians have forgotten, or maybe never really [knew] in the first place, that whether your moral response to the gay issue is that it is perfectly permissible in the eyes of the Bible, or that it is totally reprehensible, your interpersonal response should be absolutely no different to gay people.

The response, by the way, is love. Period. It's love and open arms, regardless of your position on the morality.

Your latest LP, Feedback, is a worship album. Yet it's a different kind of worship album in many ways, including the fact that it's mostly instrumental. How do you respond to people who say you've "gone soft" or that you're "not Christian enough"? And, conversely, to people that say you're "too explicitly Christian" -- that you should just "keep your religion to yourself"?

I certainly get some of those [comments]. You can't please everybody, and I don't do this to please everybody. But the job of any artist is to look at the world and tell you what they see. Every artist, whether they acknowledge it or know it, has a grid through which they view the world and make sense of what they see. Even if it's a grid of unbelief -- that you don't think there is anything orchestrating the world and that everything is completely random -- that is a grid through which you make sense of the world.

A lot of "Christian art" is about the lens they're looking through, rather than the world they see through it. I'm not going to criticize anybody for doing that, but I would rather look at the world through the grid of following Jesus and tell you what I see. But that doesn't presume that all the art I'm going to make will be about following Jesus.

The year I made Stockholm Syndrome, there were a lot of triggers that brought issues of race and sexuality to my mind. I have a lot of friends and family that have suffered because of the church's judgment; my best friend in the world is gay. I felt a lot of people around me drawing lines in the sand, and that year I decided: I don't want to draw lines and have to be on one side or the other, but if someone's going to push me to one or the other side of the line, I'm going to stand on the side of those being judged because that's where I feel Jesus meets people. Making Stockholm Syndromewas about that journey. That same lens, this year, brought Feedback to life. They are very different pieces of art, but the exact same ethic brought both of those records out.

What place do you see Christians having in such a religiously diverse culture? How should Christians respond to things like anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence?

Again, my first response is that Christians need to see ourselves as the same as those we're pointing our fingers at. The exact same thing goes for the conversation on religious diversity. We have got to see ourselves as the same as those we might perceive as our enemies. Not only is that a good idea; I think it's a direct commandment from Jesus.

That is counterintuitive to me, but Jesus says we are to be preemptive about how we love. I think Christianity has a very unique position in these arguments to demonstrate what we believe, to where we might not even have to tell people about [Jesus] and that his primary message was love, if we demonstrated it better.

I think this is an especially important moment and conversation. At a time when everybody in our culture is talking about tolerance, it seems that tolerance has the highest premium of any response -- "If we just tolerate one another..." But my feeling is: Who wants to be tolerated? People don't want to be tolerated; they want to be loved.

I don't want to be tolerant of people. I want to move toward and love people, to know them and know their stories, and to tell them my story. I think, if we did more of that, we'd all learn that our stories aren't that different, and that there might even be a bigger story -- a meta-narrative -- that we're all tied up in together.

As an atheist working to engage the religious and the nonreligious around positive dialogue and action, I wonder what you think can be done to bridge what is perhaps the biggest interfaith divide -- that existing between some atheists who want to see the end of all religion and seem to reserve a special malice for Christianity, and some Christians who believe that atheists are leading to the destruction of our values?

I believe that it's going to take going beyond tolerance, to love and care for those who are not like us and don't believe like us. That's a spiritual discipline, for Pete's sake. One of the hallmarks of following Jesus is to pursue and love people who are different than we are and have different beliefs than we do, and to live our lives loving, understanding and coming into common ground with those people.

This is going to be one of those untelevised revolutions; it's really going to take all of us, individually, getting to know one another better. What changes people's minds and changes people's language is relationships. I personally don't think that any Christian who doesn't have a friend -- not just a token friend, but someone they love and care about -- who is gay should speak out about the gay issue. I think that should almost be a requirement to publicly voice your opinion, because I can't tell you how it changes your posture and your language when you're not just talking about a "behavior" or a "faithless" group of people, but a family member or loved one -- someone who, when you're done saying what you're going to say, you'll have to deal with.

I'm not saying that we should change our positions on things we think are absolutely true, but it should bear some weight on what we say and how we say it. Everything would change if we actually knew each other. That's really what it's going to take.

What is your vision for the future of Christianity? What kind of Christian community do you want to see?

Honestly, I would just love to see Christians following Jesus. He was not an easy guy to follow, especially when he started talking about loving neighbors and loving enemies and going beyond tolerance to live your life with people who are nothing like you and disagree with you. I really want to hammer on some of these points, because I think they are the hallmarks of following Jesus.

I don't think that Christianity, Jesus or the Bible have failed; I think that Christians have failed to believe it and to do it. If Christians would just look at the life and the words, and pursue Jesus, I think they would suddenly find that it's incongruent with a lot of cultural Christianity and Christian practice. I would love to see Jesus lead all of us out of this ghetto of Christian subculture.

Even if that happened, we'd still be diverse members of one body, so it doesn't mean we'd suddenly become homogenized. We'd all still have our particular personalities and gifts. Those differences are good. But the most primary and basic ethics that compel us as followers of Jesus should change, and it would change everything and reorient us back to what it actually means to be a Christian: to love.

Romania

Romania is a country located in Eastern Europe. It has a population of over 21 million, almost 90% of which are Romanian. They speak Romanian and the adult literacy rate is 97%.

Romania has the highest number of orphaned children in Europe. In the year 2010, there were 62,000 children in the care of the state. 19,000 were in orphanages.

In the year 2008, 2 children were adopted from Romania.

In the year 2010, 0 children were adopted from Romania. ZERO.

19,000 orphans and not ONE was adopted. Not because no one wanted them. But because the Romanian government has closed off international adoptions.

19,000 sweet children of God, trapped in these horrible institutions. Orphanages in Eastern Europe look nothing like orphanages in the US. (This is not to say any orphanage is a great place to be.) There are so many children, that by the time each child is fed and changed, there is little to no time to hold them, stimulate them, love on them. This is why I’m going. To share love with these babies. To hold them. To make them feel like they are important.

So I guess what I’m asking is for you to pray and to believe with me. I believe in a God who loves and saves His children. I’m asking you to pray and believe with me that the Romanian government will open up their doors to international adoption, that those children might find a home.

On that note, remember my sweet little Nicholas and Alexandria?

Nicholas

Alexandria

Please remember them in your prayers. I’m firmly believing that this is the year that they will find their homes. Someone to love and to be loved by them. Will you believe with me?