redemption for josie

When God spoke to me about taking the whole fam to China, I believed it was because he wanted to do a work of redemption, a work of restoration, especially in Josie’s heart.

She was abandoned at birth, and spent 12 years with a foster family before being sent back to an orphanage.  She was a terrible student, even by her own standards.  Her foster parents never cared if she did well in school.  She couldn’t hear the teacher (chronic ear problems that are still to be repaired) so she struggled to learn.  Her teachers told her that she was not smart, that they weren’t going to waste their time trying to teach someone who couldn’t learn.  Consequently, she never got any help, and learned to not try.  I don’t know how she passed from grade to grade.  She didn’t want to be adopted; she wanted to go back to the foster family who cared for her.  But a teacher pt her name on the “America” list, and a couple decided to adopt her.  When she met them, she didn’t like them.  She didn’t like the way they looked, didn’t like the fact that she would be an only child, and didn’t want to come to America.  She was miserable, bratty, rude, and cried the whole time she spent with them in China.  It didn’t get better once they arrived in the States.  After 3 months of struggle and tears and misunderstanding and frustration, they were looking for another family to take her.

That’s when God brought us together.

We’ve had some breakthroughs, as well as our share of breakdowns.  But there have been bright spots, and our Josie is nothing like the girl who came to America against her wishes.  School has been difficult.  She still struggles to hear, which compounds the difficulty in learning.  She never learned to study, and has trouble comprehending.  Her basic skills in the realm of education are severely under-developed.  But we’re gaining ground, making progress.

One of the good things to come from her time in America before joining Team Sublett is that Josie met Jesus.  When she was processing the move to State College, she asked her therapist a great question:

Will Jesus be with me in Pennsylvania?  Jesus helps me.

Oh yes, my darling daughter, Jesus will be with you, and will continue to help you.  In fact, I heard him whisper that he had a gift for you in China.

I wasn’t sure what that would look like, so I kept my eyes and ears open every day, waiting for that moment.  It wasn’t in the Forbidden City or on the Great Wall.  We didn’t find it in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia.  But one day, down in the market area of Guangzhou as the kids were bartering over souvenirs, that promised gift arrived.

Josie was serving as our interpreter, helping us go back and forth with the shop-lady over some little trinket.  The lady was (like most of the people we met) blown away at the size of our family, and the fact that we were adopting yet another Chinese child.  She looked all of us up and down, from the big American boy to the little Chinese boy, and all the various girls in tow.  Then she turned to Kim, pointed at Josie, and said, “This is your girl?  She is very smart.  She speaks both Chinese and English.  She is very smart!”

It didn’t hit me right then, though we all stopped short, just for a moment.  No one–NO ONE–had ever told Josie that she was smart.  We captured that moment in our hearts, and talked about it with Josie afterwards.  Before coming to Team Sublett, Josie had been abandoned, shuttled around, set aside, and ignored.  She was told that she was dumb, that she couldn’t learn, and that she was useless.  Yet here she was, in the midst of a whole new situation, serving as our interpreter, helping a new son transition into our family, hearing, “You are smart.  You are important.  You are helpful.  You are valuable.”

I don’t know how much more healing God has to do in Josie’s heart.  With the struggles she’s having this week with school, we’re clearly not out of the woods.  There was no magic thunderbolt of knowledge.  But something broke loose in her that day in China.  The healing has begun, and I just KNOW that God is going to finish what he started.