A Broken Family Reunified
August 3, 2020
If you’ve followed our work for any length of time, you know our mission is to solve the root causes of kids being orphaned or trafficked. We hope children never experience the worst of what the world would throw at them, so we seek to catch kids before they ever fall.
When we met a set of siblings many years ago…a couple brothers, a couple sisters, they were caught in a web of trauma that would honestly be difficult to articulate without several visual aids. They needed to be caught. They needed rescue.
Because we always choose to see children within their God-given support system, we knew this actually meant rescuing an entire family.
We soon became a soft landing place not only for the children, but also for their mother who was permanently crippled by domestic violence. And we allowed this family to come in and out of care when their past continued to wreck havoc on their present. For the better part of the last decade, we’ve embraced the messy, the hard, and at times the incredibly discouraging.
Yet alongside the mess has been miracle after miracle.
We’ve cried joyful tears watching as these kids are growing into strong, confident young adults. We’ve watched as their trauma has turned into resilience and their fears have morphed into dreams for the future.
But honestly? This next miracle? We didn’t see it coming.
When an estranged daughter who had been trafficked to Malaysia found refuge in our emergency shelter, she became the connection to more siblings across Thailand. Soon our team was facilitating a video call between children who had been lost for years and their own mom. After all they had been through, they never thought they would see each other again!
When this mother saw the face of her children who she had not seen in years, her eyes instantly filled with emotion. We got to watch her light up and shed tears of joy to see her kids flourishing and growing. And she did this from the safety of our shelter, surrounded by love.
This mom hasn’t always been able to live into the fullness of her own hopes for her children and her own trauma has complicated our response. In fact, it may have been easier to simply care for the children, without dealing with their family’s issues at all.
Yet, if we had placed a boundary between the children and their mother, we would have deprived these kids of their belonging, their history, and the one person they needed the most. Their safe base. We also would have partitioned ourselves right out of the beauty, and traded away our front row seats for this particular miracle.
Instead, we got to see the beauty of reunification through the eyes of a mother.
For us at Global Child Advocates, standing with children means standing with families. It means we fight tirelessly to preserve family whenever possible, however we can. It doesn’t always work, and it is almost always difficult. But it is worth it.
Just ask a mom.