Today was a travel day for you and I. Your warm snug world is about to open wide. Even as I make my way over the snow crested peaks of the Rockies and across the white prairie plains, you are travelling to your new family and home on the outside. Our family.
Your Pake doesn’t consider himself a world traveler but I have been very blessed to be in some amazing places in this wide and wonderful world that you are arriving into. I know that this first journey of yours will be a long one, and a painful one for your mom. You won’t remember even one moment of it, and your mom and dad won’t forget anything, except the pain, for all the happiness they will be feeling. When you arrive you will be greeted by love, by tears, by smiles and by unspeakable joy.
I am sorry to miss the first day and days of your life. But that too, is OK because you also will learn soon enough that life takes some rather funny twists and turns, some sad, some happy, some strange. As you will hear us say soon enough, “That just is the way it is.” I get to spend time with your sweet uncle Gabriel and hear about your arrival with him.
I am on my way to a part of the world that quite took my breath away the first time that we encountered it; so far from the other world that I had lived in for the first 45 years of my life. It tore away a piece of my heart, and it fills me with both joy and sadness to go back again and again. I can’t quite explain why, but your papa knows something of what I am talking about.
Your journey to your home on the outside, which began today, will very likely take you to these places as well, through the stories you are told and the stories you read, and through the stories that grow in your imagination. And it will tear away some piece of your heart as well. I’m sorry about that, but if you want to truly be alive to this world, in all of its beauty and in its brokenness, that will have to happen.
You are starting a life that might well take you into the next millennium. Just imagine, you at 80 in the year 2100. By then you will have done some amazing travel on your own. I won’t make it into the 2100’s but I am so happy to be your Pake and to travel part of this new journey with you and your new family. Welcome to the world of wonders. Some of the journeys you take will be on well-traveled roads and on others, yours will be the first footsteps. But you never travel alone.
Love Pake