Hope Runs

In 1998 our family fell in love with Ethiopia and a little girl named Meseret. We met “Messie” through Compassion International’s Child Sponsorship program in Ethiopia when she was 7-years old.

Ten years later, we sensed God leading us to adopt a little girl from Africa who needed a forever family. But this is all we knew: she would be an orphan in Africa.

Where in Africa, we wondered? It only took a day or two for God to lead us back to the same place our hearts had  been for ten years: Ethiopia. And in 2009 when we traveled to meet Aster, He orchestrated the details and timing so  we could also meet Meseret and her family.

I remember thinking: How did we get to this place we never expected to be, in the middle of a story we never thought would be ours?

Recently I was beautifully reminded how God takes us places we never expected to go and writes a story we never thought would be ours. Over Spring Break, I started reading Hope Runs, about the life of a Kenyan boy named Sammy and young American woman named Claire, and I couldn’t put it down. Today I’ve invited Claire to share {their story} with us…

“This is the story I was meant to tell: A story of Africa, that didn’t start on her soil.

A story birthed on a dreamed-of trip around a changing world. A trip of cheap, bumpy airlines and too-heavy backpacks and endless cups of sweet black tea and hundreds of books and running, running, running as far as the eye could see. 

A story meant to end when two twenty-something girls summited a Kenyan mountain peak at the end of a year away.

But that story never came to be.

Instead, a good God intervened miles from the mountain and kept one girl’s feet on solid ground, far from the peak that sought a climber.

And this God told that girl in a whisper of breath, with one word repeated again and again: stay.

Stay in that cheap guesthouse she was supposed to be at for just one night before the climb. Stay, because the orphanage that owned the guesthouse would now own her heart. For a year, at first, and then for many more after that. Stay. 

And in this story, the real story, she did stay.

She stayed and began to run. She ran with fast teens and slow tiny ones, she ran with anyone who would let her, and even with those who would not.

She started a nonprofit, Hope Runs, to keep up the running, and the 170 children at the orphanage where she lived liked to laugh that she ran slower than anyone they had ever known.

And then there was the boy. Because without the boy, the story wouldn’t be much of a story after all. He was there, in the first hours of her first day at an orphanage she never knew she would live in for a year. And he stayed, by her side for the year, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, always taking pictures of what his life might be.

And when it came time for her story to move on, to move wider than Africa and to embrace other things, it was time for him to come with her. It was time for them to live a story together. For him, a new life in a far-off land.”

Hope Runs: An American Tourist, A Kenyan Boy, a Journey of Redemption is the emotional story of an American tourist, a Kenyan orphan, and the day that would change the course of both of their lives forever. It’s about what it means to live in the now when the world is falling down around you. It’s about what it means to hope for the things you cannot see. Most of all, it’s about how God can change your life in the blink of an eye. It’s about two people whose lives were transformed by meeting one another. 

Enter to Win a Copy of Hope Runs: Let us know why you’d like to win a copt of “Hope Runs” to read this summer, and maybe a friend you’d give a copy to. Also, we would love for you to help us share this amazing story of hope with  friends and family –  via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or email. Each time you share it, please  leave a new comment letting us know where you shared it and you’ll be entered to win again and again!

About Sammy:
Sammy Ikua Gachagua had lost his father to illness, his mother to abandonment, and his home to poverty. By age ten, he was living in a shack with seven other children and very little food. He entered an orphanage seeing it as a miracle with three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, and clothes on his back. When Claire Diaz-Ortiz arrived in Kenya at the end of an around-the-world journey, she decided to stay the night, climb Mt. Kenya, then head back home.

About Claire:
Claire Diaz-Ortiz (@claire) is an author, speaker and Silicon Valley innovator who was an early employee at Twitter. When she entered an orphanage in Kenya, she saw it as little more than a free place to spend the night before her mountain trek. But God had other plans. In her new book, Hope Runs: An American Tourist, A Kenyan Boy, a Journey of Redemption, she shares the unexpected place she found herself and the story God wrote that she never imagined would be hers. You can find out more about Claire and connect with her at ClaireDiazOrtiz.com.