This is a Love Story (Hope for Heaven from Haiti)

“These three remain - faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.”

     This is a love story. It is not one of those love stories where boy meets girl, the whole world seems to stop and life as we know it is never the same. There are no magical moments when the earth ceases to spin on its axis and all becomes right with the world. Nobody is fighting the evil enemy for the hand of their true love, or laughing in the face of tradition and loving despite what others think. This isn’t going to become a best seller or be made into a movie. This is about that hard, grinding, day-to-day, even when things are falling apart type of love. The kind that nobody likes (because its hard) but everybody wishes they had (because it is real).

     Heaven Kelley was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer last year. Her whole world, and that of her family, was thrown upside down. What was up was now down. What used to matter so much now meant nothing at all. Their world stopped spinning, yet was twirling around so fast that they didn’t know what was here and what was there. I know, seems like it doesn’t make sense, but nothing really makes sense when your 12 year old is given a diagnosis that nobody has ever heard of and not many are sure how to treat.

     When Christella was 7 she was sold to another family to be a child slave. Fabiola, she grew up on the streets of one of the world’s worst slums. Shelove lived there too. Rebecca, she was abused as a 2 year old so badly that she had a years worth of surgeries to correct the damage. Their world? It was still, and spinning and just about everything in between at the same time. They had no idea what was going on, they had no idea what was next or if they would ever be anywhere safe again.

     A little girl in Pennsylvania (or Tennessee at St. Jude’s, depending on her schedule). A group of little girls in Haiti. They have never met each other. They can’t speak a single word of the same language. They live in drastically different worlds. One is pale white, the others varying shades of brown. One is a cheerleader, the others have no idea what a cheerleader even is. So different, about as different as can be. Yet there is a tie that binds them together. This tie makes all of the other junk, like skin color and hobbies and geography irrelevant. The tie that binds is love.

     There is something about little girls who have been through a bunch of garbage in their lives that makes their hearts about the size of basketballs. Heaven is extremely interested in the girls at the orphanages, as her grandmother Brenda (a long time sponsor) has been sharing with her about them for some time. She has sent them things and written them letters. Last month, on two separate occasions, we shared Heaven’s story with the girls at both the Bethesda and Grace homes. The outpouring of love that they had for her, the compassion and the empathy were palatable. It was as if they were saying “Yeah, stuff happened to you that you can’t control and it hurts like crazy. I know how that is. You need some love? Some prayer? Some support? Yeah…we got this”

     At Bethesda the girls worked like crazy to make their own “Hope for Heaven” and “For Heaven’s Sake” t-shirts, like the ones hundreds of us in Pennsylvania wear around to support her and her family. They prayed for her, put up her pictures in the home and wrote her individual cards. (Shout out to our friends at AWAKEN Haiti who joined in this). At Grace, the girls each took a picture in a “Hope for Heaven” shirt and made her individual cards.

     Tiny little hands working hard making shirts, making cards and writing notes of encouragement in two orphanages in Haiti. One little girl fighting with chemo side effects and feeding tubes in the U.S. A bunch of big, giant hearts connected in ways that none of us reading this are going to understand. There is something to be said about not having to feel empathy because you do actually know what things feel like first hand. Heaven has an understanding of the Haitian girls that we just don’t get. They have the ability to feel a little bit like Heaven that we will never have. They have all been little girls at a place where yesterday was terrible, today is worse and tomorrow is way too scary to even think about.

     This week I was able to visit with Heaven, along with Brenda and Pam Brown, one of the leaders of our PA sponsors. We took her all of the things that the orphanage girls had made to her, along with all sorts of pictures. Heaven was humble and loving. It was one of the biggest blessings of my life to share that time with Heaven. I could see the impact of the love and the prayers of the girls in Haiti in Heaven’s eyes. It was just like the look I saw in Linshey’s eyes at Grace a few weeks ago while we wrote her letter to Heaven together. It was that look that showed the tie that binds their hearts together. It’s that “little-girl-in-trouble-who-needs-some-love, I-can-do-that-I-mean-loving-is-what-I-do” kind of look.

     The Ancient Chinese used to say that there is a tiny thread that ties all of us together. When somebody makes a move somewhere there is a reaction somewhere else. They may have been right, they may have been completely out in left field, I am not a really sure, but there is something that I do know. I know that tonight there are over 40 little girls in two orphanages in Haiti who have been through a lot of crap in their lives who are throwing up Creole prayers for a sick girl in the U.S. who they love more than we can even know. I also know there is a sick little girl tonight, either in her bedroom or her hospital room in the U.S., who has been through more than her fair share too and she is looking at pictures of those Haitian girls and praying for them because she gets it. That tiny little thread is so strong that that it will never break, it can’t break, it the kind of thread that we all dream of having in our lives. It is that kind of love that few know. It is the kinds that nobody likes (because it is hard) and everybody wishes they had (because it’s real).

For more on Hope for Heaven, search "Hope for Heaven" on Facebook

For more on the orphanages, search "Freedom Orphanages" on Facebook