Lost and Found

Dear Loved Ones,

God bless you, your loved ones and your ministries this week!

It's been forever since I wrote to you and I apologize.  I took a job as an activities provider at a memory care facility and have been working a lot.  Plus we added a new member to our family!

We now have a foreign exchange daughter from Vietnam named Phoebe and we consider her to be our real daughter, a gift from God, an answer to a deep desire/prayer that I have harbored for decades.  I am 56 and I finally got my girl!

She is a beauty beyond compare, brilliant, charming, artistic, musical, hardworking, compassionate, devoted and affectionate.  She's more than I could ever hope for in a daughter and I am blessed by every moment that she spends in our home.

Phoebe and Seth get along as though they have been brother and sister for all of their lives.  He is 15 and she is 17.  He hides behind doors and jumps out at her when she walks through them, making his scariest monster noises to scare the daylights out of her.  She screams, chases and threatens in her tiny sweet voice, "I'm going to kill you!"  which is the reaction he was hoping to hear.

Anyway, we received our first real snow of the season yesterday and this was Phoebe's very first opportunity to play in the snow.  We took photos, built snow sculptures, made snow angels, then played Fox and Geese all of which was great fun!  When Phoebe got cold we went in and she discovered that her cell phone was missing, so we went back out to look for it. 

As we searched I heard the church bells playing the hymn "Take It to the Lord in Prayer" which gave me hope that God was reassuring us that we would find it.  I had already started to pray and was hoping to find it right away.  After a half an hour of looking, Seth gave up and went into the house to make lunch. 

I offered to buy Phoebe a new phone, but she replied, "No Mom, it's too expensive.  I will find it."  She then picked up a stick and proceeded to dig through every square inch of snow in our backyard which spans about an acre of land.  I was impressed with her dogged determination and was reminded of the tenacity of the Vietnamese people during the war digging underground tunnels and then replanting the trees after the country had been defoliated by Agent Orange.

My love for Phoebe kept me out there looking as the hours passed slowly with my tummy growling and my ears getting cold.  Disappointment and frustration swelled in my chest, but was counterbalanced by the joy of spending time with Phoebe in a perfectly beautiful setting.  Out of the neighbors woods came the delightful song of the bird called a phoebe which is how our daughter got her name.  "Do you hear that bird singing?"  I inquired.

She repeated the song "Phoebe, phoebe, phoebe!" then gave me a smile and wrinkled her nose.

"From now on when I hear that song I will think about this moment with you looking through the snow for your phone!"  I replied.

I knew how important the phone was, because our girl uses it to record the lectures at school so she can listen again at home to catch the words she missed.  Besides, she accidentally shut her old phone in the car door two weeks earlier and her uncle replaced it for her.

I took a break and asked Seth to please pray for us to find the phone and he agreed.  When I returned to the backyard a thought came into my mind of where the phone might be, so I went to the spot and swept the area with my feet.  My boot struck an object, so I took off my glove to gently retrieve the cell phone from the cold wet snow.  Holding it in the air I started to dance and shout "Praise the Lord!"

Phoebe bounded over to check the device to see if it was working and it was, so we flew into the house.  I said to Seth, "Tell me the truth, did you just pray?"  He nodded and Phoebe hugged him.

Brother got to be the hero, Mom got to be the companion, Sister got to be the recipient of a small miracle.  We all got be the storytellers at suppertime when Daddy came home.

Love, Sue