Some thoughts are laughable.
Some of the things that have passed through my head in the past have been so insanely ridiculous that even I have laughed at them.
You see, I’m a bit of a dreamer and I’m a full-scale hopeless romantic. When I view things, it’s almost always through rose-coloured glasses. I can make any empty glass appear half full, if only with my imagination.
This takes me back five years when I traveled with my family to China to pick up our daughter. A visit to her orphanage in rural Jiangxi set me on my heels and firmly knocked the rose-coloured glasses off my face (even me, the hopeless dreamer). After seeing bug-bitten and thin children who would never leave the deafening quiet halls of that orphanage, I found it hard to muster up any hope at all.
I cried for the entire two-hour van trip back to our hotel.
Even my glass-is-half-full mind couldn’t think of a way to make things better for those orphaned kids.
But somewhere in my subconscious, my rose-coloured glasses must have been waiting to be put on because I remember asking if I could take the most desperate-looking child home. I was told ‘no’ of course. But several years later I would find a way, along with a whole village of others, to rescue that one child.
I also recall somewhere in the middle of that rescue effort thinking this insanely laughable thought:
“One day, that little girl is going to go to Disneyland!”
Nothing concrete was informing this ‘crazy’ thought because at the time we were having difficulty finding the child’s name, never mind getting her out of China and off to Disneyland.
But it lingered there in my hopeful soul—this thought that maybe, one day, Mei Chen (who was renamed Macy by her adopted USA family) will be spinning in a tea cup in Disneyland and this whole painful ordeal will be nothing but a distant memory.
Flash forward five years and this morning I open Facebook to find something so spectacularly unbelievable that tears well in my eyes. I even touch the face I see on my screen and utter the words in disbelief, ‘you are going to Disneyland!’
Some of the things that have passed through my head in the past have been so insanely ridiculous that even I have found them wildly unbelievable—like the thought of that bug-bitten little orphan ever getting to go to Disneyland.
But here she is on Facebook, in Disneyland with her sister Clara!
* Please support Racers for Orphans with Down Syndrome (Rods.org) and help more kids like Macy.
