In Their Own Words: Almost Home
Hello May 31st, 2022
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Written by Jody Fasnacht, TTF Adoption Aid family member
We are only two hours away from our new home, which, according to the GPS, is exactly three thousand miles away from the home we just left and next to a completely different ocean.
We are almost home. Again.
Military life means that home changes like shifting sand.
Next to me in the passenger seat, our sixteen-year-old daughter Rosalyn—Rosy—scrolls through her phone, and in the only seat behind us that isn’t filled with bags and boxes, our black lab snores. My husband and son drive the equally loaded down car in front of us. We are thankfully on the other side of New York City, so we shouldn’t have to worry about getting separated again. Thank goodness for GPS. The last hundred miles of a three-thousand-mile journey are brutal.
Rosy has found herself in a state of Almost Home more than most people ever will. She is about to move into her seventh home with us since she left her Chinese orphange at the tender age of seven and half years old. But she never looks back, only forward.
Just nine years ago Rosy stepped into a strange hotel lobby in Shandong, China, released her nanny’s hand, and ran to my open arms. It was our first meeting. “Ni Hao, Mama!” And at the airport gate in Ohio two weeks later, she let go of my hand and ran to meet her new daddy. “Ni Hao, Baba!” She didn’t look back either time.
Her excitement is contagious when we finally pull into the unfamiliar driveway we will call ours for the next three years, until the sands shift again. She runs ahead of me and climbs the stairs to the wooden porch, and we are met with a gorgeous view of the bay to our west. The gift of sunsets over water! It was as if God picked this spot out just for her. Maybe because no beauty escapes her notice. She prefers to make her home where she is surrounded by beauty, but even if we are plunked down in a place where beauty is more difficult to find, she shrugs her shoulders and creates it herself.
I marvel at the grace and ease with which she makes each new place her own. She fills the blank canvas of yet another bedroom—“I just want the bedroom with the most light!”—with strokes of color: paintings, flowers, plant arrangements, and tapestry hangings. She organizes her bookshelf and her closet by color. Still the most beautiful thing in the room is herself.
She was not seen this way those seven and half years at the orphanage, where other children ran away from her, the “monster,” this darling girl with dimples and a soft voice; where the school-aged children in the orphanage who didn’t have broken skin were allowed to attend school with neat uniforms and books, but she was uninvited; where instead of being taught even to write her own name, she was sent to another part of the orphange to help the nannies feed and change the babies. When she had enough English tucked into her brain and tongue, she told me, “The nannies had favorites, but I was no one’s favorite.”
I think of the hundreds of thousands of precious ones still waiting. Lord, may they be almost home, too! It is their turn to be someone’s favorite! Rosy will always be our favorite, the way each of our children are. That God would make the impossible possible in bringing this beautiful flower into our home and hearts makes me feel like she is one of His favorites as well.
When we first saw her picture on a waiting child list, we had no idea the joy and beauty this little girl would bring to our family. We didn’t know she would lead us to always pause and notice God’s beauty on this path to Almost Home: in sunsets, flowers, colors, trees, and cupcake frosting. We didn’t know she would teach us we could always leave something a little more beautiful than the way we found it when it was time to move on.
I sang, “Jesus Loves Me” with her before bed every night when she was first home, and she immediately believed me. She put her heart in his hand and never looked back.
We hope that you were as encouraged by Rosy's story as we were upon reading it. May we all be inspired and challenged to see the world as she does - God's beautiful creation worthy of our delight.
To support the homecoming of children in need worldwide, please consider donating to the Foundation today. Your gift may just change an entire life.
