I don’t think every surprise in life has been strategically pre-planned and pre-timed. I used to think they were, but I’ve lived a lot and seen a lot and it’s just too hard to believe that anymore. I’ve seen people who actually tweaked their own destiny, made adjustments to it, and because of it changed the course of the world or at least changed the course of the lives of others.
They are radicals who speak up even before it’s trendy to talk about ‘such things’. They are researchers who won’t sleep until they break through from hypotheses to fact. They are thinkers who keep asking the strangest questions until they get the answers or at least come up with better questions. They are artists who won’t quit mixing it up because they just know there is another expression or colour out there. Sometimes they are world leaders obsessed with power.
What got me thinking about such things? Well…
It’s coming up the the 14th anniversary of the day when a premature baby girl from the Lahu tribe in Northern Thailand came to live with us as our daughter, Amanda Jasmine Siriporn DeWit. I’ve had a lot of questions concerning the events leading up to that April 14th in 1997. Did God ordain for her biological mother to get malaria and die giving birth on a dirt floor in a meager hut, just so that Peter and Pat would be able to adopt her as some sort of comfort after having lost a little son? Did God ordain for her father to run away in fear of the ghost of his dead wife so that an elderly grandmother would then be left to be the soul caregiver of this baby? Was the elderly grandma following a pre-determined plan when she threw the baby girl into the jungle and left her there to cry for three whole days, naked and alone and vulnerable to all the creatures of a tropical countryside?
Some would say yes, but I say no.
Where we actually do see God’s hand in such tragic events is when we step back, in hindsight, and consider all that could have been if anyone of those elements of Amanda’s story had been different. That’s where people who live by the Divine Rhythms can intervene, where they can do something to alter the course of someone’s destiny as well as their own, and they are able to recognize Beauty and Goodness even in situations that are universally considered ‘bad’ or ‘evil’.
It’s an evil result of greed that people in some parts of the world still have to die from malaria, that they live in such dire poverty that a grandmother can’t even find powdered milk to nourish a newborn. It’s evil that there are societies that allow their men to run away and leave their children fatherless. It’s evil that not everyone has access to quinine or mosquito nets, nor clean water, pre maternal health-care or midwives. These are evils that exist. No doubt about it.
In the middle of all the evil The Glimpse of Beauty we get is that a little girl escaped that cycle of poverty, escaped the fate of her mother, and who, because of having survived what was meant for evil, will be able to live a life of purpose and insight, Beauty and Goodness that she brings to our family and everyone she meets. Both of our girls were a ‘surprise’ to some extent, and yet it makes total sense that they were born. Human biology makes sense.
The girls keep surprising us, and we enjoy the options of each day and the choices we have to respond knowing that somehow, somewhere down the road, all things can work out to be Good.
Here’s a video of Amanda’s story that our middle son, Joel, made. You can hear Alycia in the background too. Make sure you watch till the end and catch the great bloopers!
Patricia DeWit
ZZDeWit Photos
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