Forever

A friend loves at all times.  —Proverbs 17:17

My youngest daughter spent her first year of life in a Chinese Social Welfare Institute.  Without the fancy name, that translates to an orphanage.  Before she came home to her forever family, she lived with anywhere from forty to eighty of her ‘sisters’, playing in a common area together, and looking at each other through bumped-together crib rails, sometimes reaching through to grasp a sister’s fingers.  

One might assume that no memory would remain of her first home since she left there at age one.  However, one only has to watch her interact with the group of sisters that came home together to know this simply isn’t true.  

In the first year of being home, all the families got them together often, usually once a month.  Then, schedules being the way they are for most, the visits tapered off until almost three years passed without the girls seeing one another.  It seemed they had lost touch.  

A reunion was planned for the summer at my home.  Since so long had passed, the girls were all a little nervous that they wouldn’t remember each other, or that they wouldn’t have anything to say.  As the girls all began to arrive, though, those thoughts quickly disappeared.  Within five minutes, they were giggling and talking like time had stood still, exhibiting a bond that only God could have formed given the dire circumstances from which they came.  

To understand today’s verse, one only has to watch these girls now each time they’re together.  We parents have determined to make better efforts to allow them to see each other.  Still yet, every time goodbyes must be said until the next visit, the girls don’t want to let each other go.  You see, they have loved each other when there was no one else to love them.  They have known what it was like to only have each other, so they will love each other at all times.  I believe that will last their whole lives.  

Amazing as it may sound, God loves us even more than that.  He loves us at all times no matter how unloveable we may act.  He will never leave us or abandon us.  He wants to be our forever family.  We need only to accept and let Him wrap His arms around us like I did with my daughter the day she became mine forever.