I wanted to share portions of a non-fiction best-selling book that is touching my heart. The name of the book is called Kisses from Katie. I find myself tearing up – if not downright weeping – constantly throughout this book. The author Katie at eighteen years old moves to Uganda for a year after highschool; she ends up falling in love with the country and people and stays there. At nineteen she finds herself a mommy to six daughters she adopts while in Uganda…and three years later adopts 14 daughters…
I so very much desire to have the heart of unconditional love this woman has for those around her…
Here is the excerpt that today has messed me up:
My fourteen beautiful girls call me Mommy. Four hundred children in the community where I live who have lost their mothers to starvation or disease or something else unimaginable call me Mommy. Because so many children are constantly shouting this word, even a lot of the adults in the villages around our home call me Mommy. “Mommy to many,” they say. Dignified men, store clerks, and parking attendants call me Mommy. I hear it in shouts as I drive down these insanely bumpy red roads; it is sung as my daughters burst through the door when they get home, it is whispered in my ear as I wake up each morning. It is hollered with joy or sobbed with longing for comfort. And every time I hear it, my heart leaps.
I am willing to bet this is how our heavenly Father feels each time we whisper His name, each time we shout it with joy or cry out in pain, every time we tell Him exactly what we need or feel:
“Father, I trust you.”
“Father, you will protect me.”
“You are my comfort place, my safe place.”
“You are mine and I am yours and we are family.”
His heart leaps and He delights in us and this is unfathomable.
Another excerpt a bit later in the next chapter:
As Sumini joined our family, I knew that one of God’s purposes in placing me here was to grow me, through my children, this heart of adoption. In an effort to be real, I will tell you: It was hard. Being a mother of six at age nineteen was just plain exhausting sometimes. But God continued to show me that adoption is His heart, and it was becoming mine.
Adoption is wonderful and beautiful and the greatest blessing I have ever experienced. Adoption is also difficult and painful. Adoption is a beautiful picture of redemption. It is the Gospel in my living room. And sometimes, it’s just hard.
As a parent, it’s hard not to know when your daughter took her first steps or what her first word was or what she first looked like in kindergarten. It’s hard not to know where she slept and whose shoulder she cried on and what the scar above her eyebrow is from. It’s hard to know that for ten years yours was not the shoulder she cried on and you were not the mommy she hugged.
As a child, it’s hard to remember your biological parents’ death, no matter how much you love your new mom. It’s hard to have your mom be a different color than you because inevitably people are going to ask why. It’s hard that your mom wasn’t there for all the times you had no dinner and all the times you were sick and all the times you needed help with your homework. It’s hard when you have to make up your birthday. It’s hard when you can’t understand the concept of being a family forever yet, because your first family wasn’t forever.
Adoption is a redemptive response to tragedy that happens in this broken world. And every single day, it is worth it, because adoption is God’s heart. His Word says, “In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will” (Ephesians 1:5)…The first word that appears when I look up “adoption” in the dictionary is “acceptance”. God accepts me, adores me even, just as I am. And He wants me to accept those without families into my own. Adoption is the reason I can come before God’s throne and beg Him for mercy…
Hopefully this has given you a taste of the richness of this book and ultimately a taste of this woman’s journey of love in Uganda, without giving it away…go buy it…may it touch your life as it has mine…
Rachel Olson 