Fall leaves at Holt Korea
Molly Holt is a second generation fighter. Her parents, Harry and Bertha, were farming in Oregon when they heard about children across the ocean orphaned by the Korean War. They wondered how to adopt children internationally. They pushed and prayed. And prayed and pushed, til Congress and the House of Representatives moved, passing a bill, giving them the right to adopt. The Holt Bill of 1955 led to the formalization of international adoption in the United States.
Fast forward sixty-some odd years. I’m sitting a bus, leaning forward in my seat to hear Molly Holt speak above the traffic outside Seoul. She reminds me of my grandmother, but in a hanbok.*
We chat about Korean grammar. She tells me about her extended family back in the States. She misses them, but fits comfortably here, in her traditional clothes and fluent Korean. I’d seen that for myself.
I’d walked through the campus of Holt Korea, a huge complex of buildings and dormitories which is one still-budding fruit of Harry and Bertha Holt’s prayers. (In fact, they’re buried on top of the mountain where the campus is built.) I’d been hugged by some of the people who Molly serves—smiling faces with Downs’ Syndrome, or cerebral palsy, twisted joints and lists of disabilities I could not begin to name.
My heart hurt because that morning I’d held a baby whose complicated medical condition Molly summarized as being born with only part of his brain. I’d had my hands held, too, in the days before by perfectly healthy little children whose hope for forever-families was growing dim.
And I was impatient…am impatient…because God has not moved on their behalf yet. They are still waiting. As adoption in Korea is attacked by church and government leaders who oppose international adoption for nationalistic reasons, and as the orphanages continue to fill—“How long, O Lord?” is a prayer Korean social workers understand.
I ask Molly, “What is the biggest overarching lesson God has taught you in your years of serving?”
“Trust Him,” she says simply. Then she lists off times of God’s faithfulness.
She warns me against placing limitations on people. She warns against viewing them in terms of their mental powers instead as beloved people who carry the image of God. Molly tells me about her father–explaining that his Christian background wasn’t always devout; that God doesn’t necessarily pick people among the strong-and-perfect to show how great is His name.
But she comes back to the exhortation to trust, like the chorus to her song: “There were many times we nearly lost our ministry,” she says. “But God provided.” Trust.
It hit me while sitting on that bus, speaking loud over the hum of traffic, the life of the lady next to me is a living testimony. Holt Korea lives on the trust that God will continue to make a way.
Molly carries on a long legacy of hearts that have hurt with the weight of compassion, and yet have trusted. As a token of that confidence, she’s spent her life in the Lord’s service, serving alongside American and Korean co-laborers, watching and waiting for Him to move. In spite of the temptation to be discouraged, Molly realizes its an endurance race. Orphan ministry isn’t a place for sprinters.
Some sixty-odd years after an Oregon farmer and his wife began to pray, the obstacles to adoption in Korea have not yet collapsed. But with patience born of trust, orphan care workers still serve; social workers still campaign, and churches are arising to appeal on the side of children. The Holts are still there.
Hope for Orphans Blog 