Thursday, December 19, 2019

"Far From Home: A Story Of Loss, Refuge, And Hope"


Chicago-based children's book editor Sarah Parker Rubio was born in the US but grew up in Costa Rica and Ecuador and is married to a Columbian composer. One day she heard a story about the global refugee crisis, and could hardly imagine what she'd tell their two sons if suddenly the family had to leave for another country. 

Yet she realized that the children and their parents caught in such a crisis were not so different from her own family. She imagined "a little boy who ... surely loved his bed and his toys and his grandparents. ... But the little boy in my imagination had to leave it all behind just because of where and when he had been born."

So she wrote "Far From Home: A Story Of Loss, Refuge, And Hope" ($14.99 in hardcover from Tyndale Kids; also for Amazon Kindle), beautifully and sensitively illustrated by Fátima Anaya.

A young boy, clutching Rabbit, is suddenly awakened one morning by his parents. "We have something to tell you," his father says. "I opened one eye. Mama and Daddy tried to smile. 'I don't think I want to hear what you're going to say,' I said. I was right."

They had to leave home. Now. "'For how long?' I asked. 'A long time,' Mama said. 'Maybe forever.'"

Eventually they arrive at a place where others like themselves are waiting, and a wrinkled old woman tells him a story about another boy long ago who also had to leave his home suddenly. 

"His mama and daddy tried to tell him why, but nothing they said made any sense." But he survived. "He grew up and helped many people. He could heal people when medicine didn't work. He could feed a crowd with one person's food. ... But he never forgot what it was like--the leaving and the waiting and the different."

We realize loss, too, is part of the Christmas story. On the last quiet page Matthew 2:13-14 says it: Jesus' parents must flee with him to Egypt. Yet "no matter what we have lost," Rubio has written elsewhere, "there is Someone who never loses us."

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