A Fight for Freedom and the Result of Prayer.

 

Months pass, they fly by like a dandelion gone to seed, flying in the soft breeze. Although its hard to compare this last year to a 'soft breeze', more like a raging storm, but that is beside the point. The point is that life has it's sly way of never stopping to accommodate anyone and that is something everyone has to except eventually.

At the beginning of this year, I began writing a list of prayers. Some things I had been talking to God about for years, some were more fresh and recent. This past week, I got to write in the date and answer to the first one all year. 

Its hard to hold onto hope, when you've been searching, asking, talking to God for months, or even years about something, and seem to never get an answer. Nothing changes, or so it looks like to our earthly minds and eyes. And when I stare at a list, full of nearly everything my heart cares the most about, and re-read through it, month after month, year after year, its hard to know if they are all just of my own desire, or if God truly does have a plan to make it come to pass. 

Hope was reignited this last week, when two young (ages 11 & 12) siblings came from Turkey to be reunited with their sisters and in-laws. This is something that we as a team have prayed and prayed about. I know many people from the states were lifting them up in prayer as well, for years. Yet, nothing seemed to happen. If fact, only bad news seem to come. 

The two children's parents are still missing, results of the 2014 Genocide. They were brought to Turkey, out of the hands of ISIS but held there since their parents could not be located. Their sister tried desperately to gain custody and bring them back to their family. She has tirelessly work for years, visiting them in Turkey even when she had little money and they no longer could speak their mother tongue of Kurdish to her. She just needed to see them, be with them, and show them that they were not alone and that someone was fighting for them. She faced her paperwork being denied over and over. Officials saying no to the release of them again and again as she would go to the city to state her case.

This lady never gave up. She continued fighting for their freedom, even when it seemed no one else was. 

Even when she finally stood in court for the last time. After all her paperwork was finished, after all the hoops she jumped through, all the money she spend, and they told her that her case was closed. Her claim was revoked and she would not have any more court dates, because it was finished, she did not gain custody, and would not be bringing her siblings back to Kurdistan. 

Even after all that, she told us, "I will just being the process again." 

And she did. This woman is a fighter. 

Even after she spent many horrible years in captivity and was separated from her husband and her son, never to be reunited with them again, she kept fighting. She went through the pain of being pregnant and giving birth to her beautiful daughter while in captivity only to be separated from her, threatened, and abused beyond comprehension, later reunited with her baby who faced injury during an airstrike and put this dear woman on her last stretch of faith. She told me, "In that moment, I didn't know how I could keep living if my baby girl died. Then, some men got her to breathing again, they took us to the hospital and fixed the bleeding gash on my baby's head, and I finally felt like things might be alright." Her focus was fully on her baby, even though she had also been injured in the same airstrike.

And through it all, she continued being the warrior she is, and did not give up. 

She was smuggled out of captivity through a series of events and brought to safety with family and friends that she didn't know were still alive. She has taught me what it means to have unshakable faith as she never gave up hope of her loved ones, and her siblings returning to her.  

I sat with her when she told me her siblings would be coming to Kurdistan soon. Her eyes sparkled in a way i had never seen before. Her smile made all the sunflowers look dull in comparison to how bright and full of pure joy she was. And last week, the president of Kurdistan flew to Turkey and escorted the two siblings back into their loving sisters hands. I wasn't there when they embraced each other, but I can imagine it was as if the world finally took a break from all its caos and confusion and let a beautiful things just happen. 

Isn't incredible how after years of praying, God made a way. 

So maybe the other 101 things on my prayer list still haven't had signs of being answered, but one did. And that's amazing. 

The process of a prayer being answered before your eyes is so much sweeter when there is the history and heartache of continually laying your heart before God and trusting His plan will come to pass. 

Finally Reunited.