May
23
Written by:
David Strickland
5/23/2007 2:44 PM
Not long after the last blog post the world started to spin on me. I spent 4 years in the US Navy and I can remember that sick feeling you'd get after a night of drinking when the world would start to spin just before the ground would suddenly get ripped out from underneath you and you'd find yourself face down in the dirt. Well thats about how I felt come Monday evening. There is a lot going on at the moment with airfare and final plans, figuring out how well meet our budget since I haven't nailed down any work thier yet. Throw on top of that the fact that we are now expecting a new addition to the family in Dec and the world begins to spin.
Starting an orphange isn't always skipping through flowers on sunny days hand in hand with gratful children full of love. Sometimes it's just plain scary. Scary is what it was when I finally decided to sit down and relax a little Monday night. I popped in the final installment of the LOTR movie. Watching Frodo struggle with his own inner evils as he climbs to mount doom seemed like a good distraction to take my mind off my own concerns. As I watched I remembered something from a book I once read by John Eldrige. John was talking about these Epics and why they are so popular. He pointed out that down deep inside we all want to be part of something larger then ourselves that there is a desire to take on a giant evil and overcome it.
One day toward the end of our last trip to India we were approached by a man that said he knew of a child in desperate need of aid. Her Father and mother had got in a fight. In the end her father had poured gasoline on her mother and ignited her. The daughter a toddler at the time clasped her mother’s legs as she burned. The mother had died, the father had fled and the child extensively burned was left behind alone. After the burns had healed the child had to fend for herself. The village treated her as if she was cursed and the child had to beg for food. We were approached asking if we would consider accepting her into our orphanage. Unfortunately at the time we had already relinquished control of the orphanage and the new caretakers felt they could not accept more children.
Toward the end of the movie after all the heroics are over. Frodo is quietly sitting at his desk struggling with how to deal with his experiences. Finally in a conversation with Sam Frodo says that the shire has been saved but not for him. That’s when I realized that no matter how steep the grade this hill gets as we climb it there really is no turning back. There is no longer any place my wife and I will be able to escape the memories of the plights of the children we have seen. We've been back in the states now for 2 years and yet still the wound in our hearts given to us by the eyes of the children of India has not healed and likely never will.