Time spent well

Time for Service

Jess, Bryn and I visited a local Salvation Army Orphanage on Sunday to hold the babies and help the nannies. We went there with a local friend and fellow church member, Charnell DuCoc. It was, of course, a humbling and uplifting experience to just for a little while to try to make a difference in the life of a child. The baby room reminded me so much of Lucy’s orphanage, and though I know that South African law prohibits Americans from adopting here, I couldn’t help but search the baby’s faces to see if one of them was meant to be a Graham. Brynley was absolutely fantastic with the babies; she smiled at them, held them, changed their diapers and just ministered to their needs with tenderness and joy. Jess was of course just as loving and affectionate. I felt sad I was so wrapped up in the babies that I never took a picture of Jessica with them, we only got a picture of her with Florence, the nanny who worked in their room.


It is kind of hard to describe a visit to an orphanage. This is the fourth I’ve been in. Two in Haiti, one in Vietnam and now here. It kind of seems dramatic to tell you “we visited an orphanage”. The sadness of the word is real. But the babies inside strive to be happy. Their world is small enough yet that their desire is to smile and be smiled at. To love and feel loved. They don’t yet have the carry the weight of their circumstance, and there is a grace in that which is hard to explain. Knowing what they will face, a visitor has a deep desire to take away their future suffering, but as you hold them for that hour or two, feed them warm bottles and change them into clean clothes you are just so wrapped with the blessing it is to be around these little souls that the gravity of their future is far away. You just want to love them.

Then you leave, and it all floods into your mind. The truth of their loneliness. The reality of their future. The sadness of their circumstance. It is all there; sitting on your heart and pushing out the tears. Once the hour of holding is behind you the days and weeks of remembering their needs is in front, and you go about your business a little differently for a while. More thoughtfully, more thankfully. Because you remember those smiling babies and the harshness of the future that awaits them.

That is why we must go back, and go back often. Perhaps in the helping we will experience change that doesn’t just last a few days or a few weeks, but true change that penetrates and lasts for eternity. We open our hearts to the truth that we must be willing to sacrifice and serve to lift those little lives out of the futures that now await them and into more hopeful circumstances.

I’m not changed yet. So I must return. And if one of those faces bares witness to me that another Graham waits to come home, I hope we’ll have the courage to listen and the fortitude to persevere until he can. So in the effort we can be changed again, and so he can be given the bright future intended for him.

But, probably, that is not the scenario. Probably it is just for us to hold and love, to minister and be taught by the babies in their cribs in the orphanage.