How was your Mother’s Day? Our morning started with Sunshine making coffee for me and then all of us rushing out the door to the 8:30 service at church. We were late, which was disappointing because I love being in time for all of worship. Despite that, we got seats near the front, which helps the kids stay more focused.

If you’ve read my blog for long, you know that I spend a lot of time on the road traveling to appointments for my children. In a span of two weeks, I’ve driven home from Seattle, to and from Montana, and back and forth to Seattle one more time. During the two years the girls were seeing a therapist in Seattle, we drove 32,000 miles – the equivalent of one and quarter times around the circumference of the earth.

The Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit kicked off today in Nashville. It’s a fantastic event, championing the cause of the fatherless. Great speakers will take the stage and workshops will be presented by my friends. My Facebook feed is filling with updates from them. It’s a great event and I’m not there – but I’m pretty okay with that.

I often think about the great needs in this world and wonder how we will ever fill them; will our efforts ever make a difference? Sometimes those vague questions become very real. What would it be like to save a baby’s life – to hold a cold, abandoned boy to your chest and sing over him?

A little over a year ago I met Julie at the Refresh Conference. She and her family were preparing to move to Soddo, Ethiopia where her husband was going to work as a physician at Soddo Christian Hospital. That hospital is dear to us because Eby and Little Man were both cared for there, and when we traveled to visit Soddo, we were invited to stay in a guest house on the hospital grounds.

One trip to Colorado, an unexpected drive home from Seattle (after my flight was canceled), a trip to Montana to visit Dimples, and now, I’m in Seattle with five of my kids. I nearly cried when I had to get in the car again on Wednesday. For a woman who loves to be home, this is downright painful.

The upside to every single trip is the wonderful people I get to be with, both in the car as we cross the miles, and when we arrive at our destinations.

One of my dearest friends wrote an entry in her journal last weekend and was vulnerable enough to share it with me. Written in the wake of the death of a young man she loved, it is raw and honest. While one mother grieves the loss of her son, my friend faces it with the knowledge that they could have easily exchanged places.  She could be the one whose son is gone from this life.

Hear her tear-stained words.

If my son had any other illness there would be no shame or stigma attached to it. There would be support from friends, help from the medical profession, and hopeful treatments. People would understand. They would not be afraid to ask about him and they wouldn’t have “that” look in their eyes when they did – the look that says, “I’m sorry your son isn’t ‘normal’…that he is flawed, different, abnormal…somehow less than.”

My friend, Jody, gave a talk at the Embracing Orphans retreat that was anchored around this quote by Frederick Buechner,

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.

I woke up this morning thinking about Jody standing in front of us telling her story in a gentle, vulnerable way.