Shalom

We left Zhengzhou for Guangzhou today. On Wednesday, we had returned to Zhengzhou from Jiaozuo along the flats of the Yellow River. We saw so many tiny towns dotting the dusty rutted road. The economic bloom of Beijing has not yet pollinated here. Traffic was wild, with donkey cars, transfer trucks, buses, private cars, bicycles, motorized scooters, pedestrians, and police all competing for right of way. We saw the inevitable result just before lunch: a woman on a motorbike has collided with doom, and she lay spread flat, facedown across the roadside, her lifeblood puddling around her head. Shane turned YoYo's face close in to us, his gentle voice singing "Big car big car big car" in my ear as I saw her outstretched arm. At once this land seems so hard, with its earthquakes and control and battering snows and poor roads and undrinkable water and dirty hospitals and teeming life and fleeing monks and desperate disparate people. What would her mother think, seeing that hand flat on the pavement, remembering her birth? It is more than I can bear, yet just hours away are galaxies, it seems, of mothers' children dead in the rubble of cities which shook down to the ground.

I think of Tian Yo growing up, and of all of the persons whose love has carried him to this moment, and of all the sheer persistence and effort it has taken, and the miracle of it. I know only One who could author such a tale. And I know that this little boy cannot carry alone the weight of this love--it must remain effortless, he cannot possibly pay it all back, he can only maybe partly receive its sum and be aware of it. How much effort, how much love, was I unaware of as a child, and how much painstaking time on my behalf was squandered at any point when my child's mind was not ready to receive or to comprehend? There is no guilt in this, only wonder. I cannot as of yet draw conclusions, or I will render myself unteachable. I can only hope to love without expectations attached. This boy, this prince, has reached the sum of three years with a story larger than I can imagine, but he will do stupid things and wise things. If he is buried in a landslide, who am I to say his story, our story, is wasted? The events thus far have been not a means to an end, as a prelude to a life of leadership or remarkable character, but instead have been their own fullness, fruit of the love of others.

We are all tired, and we are all heartsick a little. But we are hopeful.