The Juke Box Girl.

Kate – the girl with a thousand hugs to give.

I met Kate at age two, the day she became my sister after my parents adopted her and my two other siblings from Russia. This moment was when hope first bloomed for Kate. She recalls the feeling of adoption after living the first six years of her life in the orphanage; “although I was too young to know the significance of adoption, I wasn’t too young to know that I had felt chosen to be loved.”

Kate doesn’t know this, but she is like a firework show to the hearts of the people around her – always dancing, singing, and giving away hugs like cotton candy at a baseball game. She is simply a joy and quite possibly my favorite human.
Later in her life, after surviving a drug addiction of 5 years, where she recalls “completely losing all sight of hope,” she regained sobriety and found herself re-tilling the ground of her life, working hard, and finding herself again.

It wasn’t until her second anniversary that she looked up and began to see a garden of possibility – she began to see hope sprout around her. “I began to see things come to fruition that almost seemed too good to be true… I had forgotten what hope felt like for those five years, and I began to dream again that day.”

Now, as a soon-to-be dental assistant living in the mountains near her family, she is a walking dance party, radio station your favorite random songs, and a juke box machine of free hugs. Maybe, for those who have been in the deepest holes of life’s struggles, the bigger the hole that God rescued you from, the larger the tree that He can plant.

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