Welcome Sienna Faye Pound!

"So then I said, I love shrimp puffs"

Our college student Ploy's first golf club ever held, first shot---about 10 feet

Greetings from Thailand!

Someone once said that life is like a railway track. We have joys and sorrows running side by side through our life.

There are times when it can feel like it is all one or the other but the majority of the time it is some mix of both.

On our greatest days, some sadness still lurks in our hearts.

And on our worst days, there is still some small spark of hope within us.

This season of life has been marked by many joys for us in Thailand.

The greatest being the birth of our daughter, Sienna Faye Pound born on October 27th.

It is rare I meet a miracle face to face or at least rare that I recognize it. And it is rare that a miracle fits in your hands.

But seeing my daughter for the first time reminds me of how little I understand of life and our world.

It's summer camp time in Chiang Mai!

All the ladies in our neighborhood came to see the new baby.

She's already got grandpa figured out.

I am only a few inches, pounds and abilities beyond that tiny, helpless child.

But we share a dependency that we do not fully grasp and the great gift of life together.

And just when I am ready to throw my hands up for joy and sing of how good life is, I am brought face to face with the darker side of life.

Good friends and people I love are struck with cancer.

A family close to mine loses a daughter to suicide.

These are young people, dad's with young children, suddenly struggling to survive a brutal disease.

Many of you know my younger brother Jon died of cancer. For me cancer holds an especially bitter place in my heart.

The joy of my daughter is interrupted by the suffering of my friends.

There is a cowardly part of me that wants to turn a blind eye to their suffering.

This is usually how most of us respond to the poor. It is just so hard to see and so easy to look away--like a homeless man in the midst of a Christmas shopping trip.

It is an unwelcome reminder that even in our joys, something is still wrong.

The shark and the unicorn on Halloween!

Baby yawns are the best.

Elephant statues!

I want to enjoy my joy for a little while, free of the blemish of another's sorrow.

But the better part of me knows this is an ugly selfishness that will never lead me to joy.

If I believe the path to happiness is love (and I do) then I must learn to love more, not less.  Even if that causes me more sorrow in the short run, it is still the way to happiness in the long run.

When my turn comes for sorrow (which it will), when the joys seem to have vanished and life no longer seems a good thing, it is precisely then that I most want a friend to come be with me in my sorrow.

Of all the miseries in life, misery alone may be the worst of all.

That is why the step towards joy might well start by stepping into someone else's sorrow.

We have to learn to care for each other and that starts by learning to care about each other.

We work with orphan children.  Whom, as it turns out, are every bit as cute as any other children.
And when people can see them, it doesn't take long to love them.

But it can be very hard to help people see them.

We have a natural aversion to suffering, even seeing other's suffering.  And the temptation is to think that our happiness depends on how well we manage to avoid suffering, our own and others.

But that is not true.

Joy is not merely the absence of sorrow, but the presence of love.

When we know we are loved, when others come along side us, celebrating our joys, and sharing our sorrows, there is joy.

It is right that we should rejoice, and it is right that we should weep.

We must learn to do both together.

Sweet prayers of our staff for the Pound family!

Our incredible, illegally-parking, German midwife!

So every day I celebrate my beautiful little girl, my son, my wife, and every good thing in my life right now and rejoice over them.

And I talk to my friends, I pray for them, I find ways to help them---and I weep with them.

This becomes a rhythm in my life, the movement of joy and sorrow together.  It is not something I do alone, but alongside people I love, and who love me.

I look back on my own words in my previous post and I wrestle with them.

Is everything going to be alright?

It certainly won't all be easy. It may involve a lot of sorrow and weeping.

So we must learn to rejoice and weep together.

We are not alone if we have each other, if we choose to share each other's joys and sorrows.

This is the unique contribution of Christianity: none of us ever suffers alone.  Our God is not high above our human pain, but He comes down and shares them with us.

Divine tears are still a hard thing for me to grasp, but somehow I am comforted that they mix with our own.

Just now, on one "train track" of our lives:

We are so glad to welcome the Parker family to join us at Faithful Heart Foundation. Already we are excited to work with these open, caring, people.

We are so grateful for a healthy labor and birth for Audrey and Sienna. This little girl has been a lot easier than Ezra was in the new born phase and we have really enjoyed the time together as a family.

We are excited to feel like we're finally making head-way on purchasing the land for Faithful Heart.

...At the same time...

Audrey was amazing...

This little big brother is pretty excited!

Joy and Ploy came for the snuggles!

...Two good friends battling cancer, with families struggling to care for them and balance work and children.

Another family shocked by a sudden suicide.

Add a dose of uncertainty about the future and frustration at things not going the way we would like, and you have the other track.

We need people to share our joys and our sorrows.

We need friends who have learned to rejoice and weep with us.

And to do that we must learn to open up our lives.

The great loss of pretending everything is fine, is that we never experience the comfort of a friend who enters into our sorrow with us.

That lingering doubt, that people like us for the image we present, rather than the people we are, will remain.

Living in another culture, working for a foundation caring for orphan children can be very different from life in America.

But what surprises me is how similar it is.

There are still frustrations, still feelings of failure or inadequacy, still conflicts with people, still lots of joys and sorrows.

Take time to celebrate the joys, and be grateful for them.

And take time to weep for the sorrows.

And we will rejoice and weep with you.
Thank you for doing the same for us.

In love and hope and gratitude,

The Pounds

The cuteness!