The Timeline

           We are planning for a fundraiser. It's pretty fun.  

I have some ideas about how to present some of the blogs. One could be on paper, one could be on an ipad, maybe one of them could even be hand-written.  Nice, right?

 I thought maybe we could do a timeline-to show how things have changed and where Beautiful Response has gone in the past few years. We’ve got some great pictures-pictures of the beginning, pictures of where we are now.  The tables will look really great.  Sonja is good at that. There are going to be colorful pieces of cloth and jewelry made by the kids. 

Bright screens with great resolution showing pictures of smiling kids.

Brilliant displays for brilliant kids.

We will tell some great stories and share some laughs. There will be food and drink. Sonja and I will walk around and talk to people about the great things that are happening in Uganda-about where we’ve come in the past few years. We want to raise $50,000 dollars because there is so much hope, so much further that the timeline needs to go.

We are planning for a fun evening, and you are invited-truly invited November 10^th, 4:00-6:00 Quail Lodge Carmel Valley, CA. There is so much hope and what God is doing at the orphanage is full of joy.

 

The other day I was working on fundraiser stuff and I accidently opened a word doc called Child Profile. I had meant to open a letter I am drafting to send to businesses.  I meant to open Business Letter for BR. I opened Child Profile.

Child Profile is a 46 page doc. Each page has the name of a child, the age they were in 2010, their picture, and their story.

I began to scroll down. I began to read their stories again.  Without food, badly beaten, parents died, unwanted, they had no one, AIDS, abused, alone on the streets. I saw their pictures and remembered the story behind each face. Couldn’t earn enough, mother was mentally ill, locked them in the house, left without hope.

It was their stories that got us in the first place.

`           It is their stories that get me today.
 

I read the stories again and remembered the tragedies that started our timeline. I couldn’t stop staring at my computer screen.  I couldn’t move on.

In the fun and the hope and the joy of the new things happening at the orphanage in Uganda I had forgotten the disaster-the wretched reality that some things will not be as they should have been.  I had forgotten that for these kids, the timeline has things on it that cannot be changed.

There are some hurts that no fundraiser will ever heal.  We cannot forget that.

 

But these kids, they sing about a God who rights all wrongs-a God who controls how the timeline ends.  We are following their lead.

So

The tables will look nice.

There will be food and drink.

We will laugh and tell good stories

And we will be full of hope in a God who ends the timeline so much better than it started.