She devours fact books like they’re pancakes on Saturday mornings.

War Horse. The Unwanteds. The Lightening Thief. And encyclopedias and almanacs: How many seconds in a year.  What polar bears eat. When Pluto was “discovered”.  And why the Titanic sunk.

She asks, “Why DID the Titanic sink, Mom?”

So I try to bring up my memory of James Cameron’s behemoth  film of 1997 and what I remember of an iceberg ripping a hole the size of New York in the side of the ocean liner. I explain that icebergs float with 90 percent of their mass beneath the water.  I don’t tell her about Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet with blue lips in the water or about the lower class passengers drowning below deck.

“Did babies die?” She wonders.

“I’m not sure if there were babies on the ship,” I lie.

But then I realize that she can know that. She’s almost ten and she can know that.

I explain to her that there weren’t enough life boats and that the rich people stayed in staterooms with windows. That the poorer people weren’t allowed on the boats before the rich people escaped.

She decided, “I think babies died, Mom.”

“They might have, honey. I’m sorry. Does that make you sad?” I asked her.

She sighed the sigh of realizing that the world is not perfect, that people do bad things, that earth isn’t always filled with butterflies and ponies in a meadow.

“Yes. That makes me sad,” as she moves on to another page in her book. Insects’ olfactory glands or the lowest point on the globe.

But I’m left with a catch in my throat. Not because of the sinking of the Titanic almost 100 years ago and the babies that probably died. But because my daughter is quickly learning that hatred exists outside of the tiny world of her school playground and that there are bad, evil people in the world.  And soon she’ll find out that even I can’t protect her from it all.

Babies die.

Those with the least money are given the short end of all the sticks.

Sometimes there aren’t enough life boats.

But I’m here, as her mother, to help her put the difficult pieces of the puzzle together, to guide her wild thoughts and to point her to the Answer that I can’t fully explain.

There is Hope and His name is Jesus.

How do you guide your kids through hard things? When you remember as a kid understanding that there really is evil in the world?

{This is adapted from a post I originally wrote in 2009}

I chose her because her name was HOPE.

Not my nine-year-old, Hope. The one who forever changed my life on a Saturday morning in January in 2004. But a different Hope. The one who is changing my life even now.

I didn’t make the decision at a conference or at a concert where we saw images of needy children flash across a big screen. I didn’t walk by a table with name-tagged volunteers ready to take my credit card number.

I opened up a website, knowing full well that I wanted to find a child, one who simply needed a little extra.  I would be able to help her because I’d been given so much.

So much.

Even in our leanest times we still have more than enough. She would have her own family, one who loved her well, but she might need another family {ours} to help care for her basic needs. I wanted to find the girl that God wanted me to find.

I searched by age and gender because I knew that I wanted to find a girl who my own daughter (seven at the time) would be able to write letters to someday.

Peru. Seven-years-old. My eyes flew over her first name and landed on her middle name:

Esperanza.

Hope in Spanish.

I knew I’d found her. Not in an auditorium with an emotional high, but in my comfortable living room with carpets on the floors and running water in the kitchen and bathrooms. The disparity between our too worlds was almost too much to bear when I saw her picture.

I sponsored her. I mean, our family sponsored her. And we began to write her letters.

It’s been two years now. I wonder what she is doing today and if she is healthy. My own Hope is healthy. She goes to school, lives in a home that is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. She eats good food and drinks filtered water.

My Hope has not known want.

I cannot say the same for the little Hope that lives in Peru.

Pray for my father to have work, she writes.

Pray for my schooling to go well, she asks.

Pray we don’t get sick this winter.

Thank you for the Christmas gift, she mentions.

And she draws pictures. Upside-down V’s form mountains in the background of every picture she sends us. Colored in brown with her name in perfect cursive in the corner. Flowers, trees and houses. Always houses are in the foreground.

That Hope, the one I did not name, has given me a hope that I didn’t know I needed. There is a certain joy in her words and a lightness in her artwork. As if she has somehow been able to transcend conditions none of us would want to endure, her joy and hope has changed me forever.

And maybe, in some small ways, we have helped to give her and her family some hope in an impoverished world.

This video is not about my Hope but about another one named Grace.

Would you consider sponsoring or praying for a child today?

Click here to sponsor a child in Peru through Compassion.

I gave my daughter my hips and legs, why not give her my introversion too.

I can see myself in her little body when she walks away from me on her way to the side of the pool for her swim lessons. And I can see myself when she closes the door to her room, turns on the light near her bed and sets out all her horses in a row. She says that she needs to be alone.

Being alone recharges her. I am recognizing that.

She’s all emotion and passion and testing the limits right now. I can hardly remember being seven…

What I liked.
What I felt.
What made me feel normal.
How I needed to be by myself.

I know that I need to do what I can to clear the trail for her, cut through the brush so that she can walk as unencumbered as possible through the growing-up of her. Part of that, I am realizing, is very much what I need in order to feel normal: being alone.

I don’t get charged by being in groups (like my life-of-the-party husband). It exhausts me. I love people but I love them more in smaller doses. Coffee with one friend. Three of us at the movies or spa. Running in the morning with another girlfriend. This is where I do best.

And then I need to be alone to remember who I am.

I can see this in my own daughter. She plays hard, she wants so much to be liked in groups but it tires her out just trying to keep it together all day at school. So today, when she didn’t want to sit with me but go and dream with her dolls, I let her. I protected her privacy by taking her sometimes-meddling little sister and read to her in another room so she wouldn’t bother her. I waited until she was ready to emerge, charged and ready to be a part of our afternoon.

And she did, this time reminding me who I am.

Laugh.
No laughter is sweeter than a seven-year-old in the throws of giggles: uncontrolled, unabashed, unlimited, abundant laughter. She laughs at her sister, mostly; at things she reads, giggling by herself up in her bedroom, or lately, she laughs at things she makes up. Just sitting there, she’ll laugh and tell me that I’ve GOT to hear what she thought of. So I listen. And laugh too, like one laughs at the clumsy jokes of a preschooler. But secretly I long to let it bubble up unashamed like she does so often. Rarely do I give myself this privilege.

Give.
Anything. Flowers, a back rub, her last twenty-five cents, a corner of her candy bar. This one likes to give. She draws pictures, makes castles and cities out of construction paper and scotch tape, and creates bracelets out of beads…and she gives them away. To me, her sister, her grandparents. Even with things she wants for herself, she is generous. She buys me coffee on Mother’s day with the only two quarters in her Hello Kitty wallet. I keep, she gives. I hoard and she spends. Extravagantly.

Jump.
She’s always taken risks and gets this from her father. She jumped off the side of the pool before she could swim, ran straight into the doors of preschool at 3 1/2 without looking back, and has always danced circles around me. She jumps, flies, leaps sometimes without looking what she’s going to land on but knowing she’ll land somewhere. I get stuck. Stuck in the same habits, routines and consequences. It scares me to not know where my feet are going to land, but then again, we never do know, do we?

I have a lot to learn.

Olympic Day at Hope’s school is over three hours of pomp and circumstance, tournament-style elimination and same-gendered competition in sports like Shoe Kick, Carpet Ball Throw, Bean Bag Toss and Eraser Race.

Its exhausting. And all I did was tote 8 seven-year-old girls around campus all afternoon. I didn’t actually have to kick my own shoe halfway across a gym like they did.

With only 50 first graders and nine different events spread out across ability ranges (the kids who did well in the Shoe Kick didn’t do so hot in balancing an eraser on their heads across the gym), most kids secured a first through eighth place position in something. Most kids walked away with 2 or 3 ribbons.

Except Hope.

Every time she went up to compete, she’d do well in the “practice round” and then score less than her classmates when it really counted.

Over and over again. She never won or was runner up for any of the events. And it about killed her.

And I watched the whole thing. I had to watch the peaking and dipping of her emotions throughout the post-lunch tournament. I held her on my lap as we watched all of her friends win multiple ribbons, and then spread them out across their hands as their parents snapped away on their Nikons.

As we left the gym, right shoes securely back on size 1 feet, she noticed another one of her friends crying. She hadn’t won anything either.

Almost immediately she forgot her own misfortune and ran over to put her arm around her friend. Katie needed a hug, her mother wasn’t there, and she was feeling as sad as Hope had been. She told Katie that she hadn’t won anything either. And all of a sudden, Hope was smiling and trying to make her friend laugh.

Caring for and ministering to someone else distracts us from ourselves. It distracted my seven-year-old from her own self-pity, to pay attention to her friend’s distress.

And by dinnertime? Hope had all but forgotten her ribbonless Olympic Day. Her heart was healed by hugging a hurting friend and by an after school stop at the frozen yogurt shop.

I woke up this morning to find my seven-year-old in the spot that my husband usually takes in our bed.

He’d left early to go get coffee and read like he does most Sunday mornings and Hope had come in in the middle of the night. Lately nightmares or alone feelings — I’m not saying “No.”

I turned over, and she was there, head turned away, the room already bright at 7.

She turned over to me fresh with sleep with an idea already in her head. Not “Good Morning” or “How did you sleep,” but:

“Mama, I can pour the milk for your cereal this morning! I know how!”

Of course she knows how. She’s seven and she’s capable of picking up the milk gallon. But more than that, she’s willing. And she was excited to serve me in some way that she was able. She didn’t want to help in a way that was beyond her (she didn’t offer to clean out the refrigerator or fry up some bacon). And she didn’t offer with an frowning attitude (like she does when asked to clean her room or begin her homework).

She knew what she could do well and she offered to serve with excitement and purpose. She smiled.

It was simple. A single act of helpfulness in a way that she knew would make me happy. Yet she wasn’t afraid to offer it.

Sometimes I can’t even pour my own milk with a happy heart. I can’t help others with willingness and excitement. I rarely let “How can I help?” be the first thing from my lips in the morning. I can seem to serve with joy or muster satisfaction from loving others with my actions.

I have trouble acting within charity – a selfless, sacrificial love that gives to others.

The simple charity of a seven-year-old has changed me today.

I want to serve.

Sometimes I feel like I’m missing her seven-ness. As if her seven-ness is somehow walking right by without noticing me like an acquaintance: someone I desperately want to get to know but have trouble knowing what to say.

Last night, by glow of night-light, Hope asks me to sing to her. The song my mother sang to me is the same one I sing to Hope and Naomi. It’s late, past her time, and I’m tired, but I never refuse this request.

Its the Jewel Hymn, or “When He Cometh”, and truly, I almost have hesitated with this post. This song is so precious in our family, so perfect in it’s melody, so unassuming and not quite popular – most people don’t know it. And it is so integral to the women in our family, that by speaking its name in public, it is almost as if I am telling a secret. A perfect secret.

Its a beautiful song, and I still hear my mother’s voice as she sings it to me:

“Little children, little children,
Who love their Redeemer,
Are the jewels, precious jewels,
His loved and His own.”

“Like the stars of the morning,
His brightness adorning,
They shall shine in their beauty,
Bright gems for His crown.”
(William O. Cushing, 1856)

So my little JEWELS lie up in their beds, hopefully dreaming now, about pumpkin patches or ponies in the meadow, and maybe, in their ears, is an echo of a song just like I have carried with me: from their grandmother or their mother, to help them always remember how precious and priceless they are.