Editor, Times-Union: I am writing to thank you [the Kosciusko County Highway Dept.] on the eve of the six-month anniversary of the snowstorm of 1999. You responded to a call for help on the morning of Jan. 3, to come and plow out our road so that we could get our new Finnish relatives to the airport in Chicago.
If you hadn't been able to respond that day, we would have had a very difficult situation. Our daughter had been married on Dec. 27. Seven of the family members from Finland had been staying with us for two weeks. Plus, my mother was dying of cancer, although she did make it to the wedding. Because you sent a plow that morning, my family was able to make it safely to O'Hare Airport with the seven guests, and they all made their flights home on schedule.
Too often, workers like you never receive the appreciation so well-deserved as you brave the dangers of bad winter weather. I for one didn't want any more time to go by before I sent my heartfelt thanks.
You may wonder why it has taken me so long to write this. Since the morning of Jan. 3, I spent almost all the next two weeks at my mother's bedside until she died Jan. 17. I am a school teacher, so I was kept very busy with my job through May. Also, I sent my newlywed daughter to join her husband in Finland on Feb. 1. I, along with my husband, have spent close to 600 hours going through my mother's estate since her death.
Regardless of the passage of time, since you helped my family, my gratitude has only increased. Please know that when you help someone as you did that morning in January, it has long-term effects. I will continue to thank God for you who work on our county roads and pray for your safety.
Melinda Roose, Milford
Russian Adoption
Editor, Times-Union: It was exactly the Fourth of July two years ago that we sat in a Russian courtroom completing the adoption of two of the country's many abandoned children. On this day of celebration in our homeland it was sobering to consider the contrasting plight of the Russian people, especially the orphaned children. They were numbered in the thousands in this city of St. Petersburg alone. Nine days later we would return home with these two fresh gifts from Heaven cradled within our arms and within our hearts. Yet we also carried upon our hearts the indelible impressions of the young faces left behind. We cannot forget the longing in their eyes as if, through these forsaken faces, God was calling out to His church.
When Christ came to this earth, He came in such a humble way that His own people did not recognize Him or receive Him. He did not appear very king-like, wrapped in strips of cloth in the stench of the Bethlehem stable. How many ways does He come to us now, that we do not see Him or hear Him?
Here in the "stables" of Russia and throughout the world, these babes in swaddling clothes are confronting our faith as few things will. For the cries of the fatherless challenge our Gospel with a haunting resonance. It is a cry that is intensified and prolonged by reflecting off our own indifference and independence.
Each Fourth of July we are reminded that the greatest product of our national independence is the freedom and the opportunity to make choices that may forfeit personal independence: to commit ourselves to others in a way that may leave us totally dependent on the Lord to provide what is needed to carry out the task. And when the stress and struggles of our task bring us to exhaustion, we find new strength in looking at these two bright faces and remembering where they came from. They in turn keep us consciously connected to the most blessed realities. For they remind us always that we too were once orphans in a dark and hopeless state: that Christ paid an enormous sacrifice - not to improve our material existence, but to adopt us into an intimate father-child relationship forever; and we marvel that after two thousand years, He descends to us, again, through a child.
