HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all
And sweetest in the gale is heard.
Emily Dickenson, Poems

HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickenson

At my growth group tonight, I tried to explain my last few weeks. I really like this group which is a sort of combo Bible-study/life application group. They want to know, to understand what it is I’m going thru. None of them are adopted, and they seem to get that they probably can’t fully understand it nor will they, but they still want to learn what they can. The driving need to find and know.

One of the members asked how this has affected my faith. I think it has strengtheded it in many ways. I mean, yeah, I prayed to reunite, to get to know my blood and share it with my son. Then again, I’m not dead yet! I have been given a gift, the knowledge that she is alive and while she is alive there is hope I will meet her. There is hope that I will meet my birthfather now, something that I had much less chance of a few weeks ago.

Another person once said to me that maybe finding isn’t part of God’s plan. My reply, “why, have you read his script?” I’m kind of getting sick of the “it’s all God’s plan” thing because it seems like too many people use it as an excuse. I feel it in my bones, that I need to do this. For myself and for my son. We don’t know God’s plan, all we can do is listen to our heart and soul to get a glimpse of it, and then follow it.

I understand that I may fail in this, that I may never get to meet my birthmom or my birthfather. I know that there is a chance I will never know my blood, other than my son. I know that I may need to look into my son’s eyes one day and tell him that he will have to continue the search for our history if he wants to know.

But it isn’t today. Today, I still have hope.

With us, there’s a saying, La esperanza muere ultima. Hope dies last. You can’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you lose everything.
Jessie de la Cruz, retired migrant farm worker, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.