After about ten days the group I'm traveling with and I will head up to Beijing for a few days and get to see all the sights there :) We will be in mainland China for two weeks and then after that most of the group will go home but I was asked to be a student leader at a leadership conference in Taiwan so I will be there for a week, and then after that I will head back to the USA.
I am so excited and blessed to be able to go on this trip. I will miss my family so much and feel a bit lonely knowing that I will be experiencing this for the first time without any of them :( but I know that this is a great opportunity for me and something I have dreamed about for so long now! Speaking of dreams I would just like to highlight on my family, my mom and my grandfather in specific, and how they have impacted my life and helped me get to where I am today.
My mom grew up in a christian home with four kids (my mom being the youngest), she had a mom who was loving, hardworking, and stubborn (love you grandma!), and a father who was kind, compassionate, stern, a pastor, and my moms inspiration. As a young child my mom grew up everyday watching the love and compassion my grandfather had for others and was exposed to different cultures through missionaries and families from other countries staying in her home. She had dreams and aspirations to live in either Africa or China, caring for orphans and those in need.
The love for the Lord and love for others my grandfather had was so strong and so full that it overflowed and filled my mom. Although my grandfather died when my mom was thirteen and I never had the chance to meet him, I am so thankful that The Lord saw fit to make him MY grandfather.
(My grandfather is the man on the right. He, like a lot of young men back then, served in the military before he became a pastor.)
Fast foreword a lot of years (I'm sure my mom would just love for me to say how many ^_^) I was born as the fourth child of eight kids. Until I was about ten or eleven it was just my mom raising five of us on her own. Times were tough but she still felt the conviction to homeschool us and stay at home. She had so much responsibility and so much she had to take care of, but my moms heart was so big it always had room for others whether they were adults, children, or animals.
I remember times when we were so pinched, but there would be that stray dog on the side of the road that she would take in and find a good home for, or times when her mind was so full and heart was weary, but she would always make time to listen to a person in need of a friend.
As a young kid I was sure I would grow up working with/caring for animals. I couldn't bare to watch a baby bird fall out of the tree and ignore it until it died, I would always beg my mom to let me take care of it. I remember one bird in particular, I named him Lucky.
I was about nine years old when I found him out under the tree in my front yard. I watched him all day to see what would happen. At the end of the day I got a box, some rags, a pair of tweezers, meel worms, crushed up snail (yuck!), and a baby's medicine despensor filled with water. I carefully picked up that baby bird and took him in. I raised him so carefully and when the time came, I taught him to fly. After he could fly he would be gone for days at a time, but all I would have to do was whistle and call his name and he would fly back from wherever he was and land onto my shoulder. I think that was the first time I had anything be so dependent of me. He couldn't make it alone, but I could help.
The next year after that, when I was ten, I read an article in a magazine that my mom had. It was about a young girl who was about the same age as I who lived in the Philipenes. She had just been orphaned.
It would be five years after that incident that I would first learn about North Korea, their orphans, the orphans in China, and the stateless children. Ever since The Lord has placed such a burden on my heart for these children.
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