And in the end…there is love.

Today I was looking through my pictures from my trip to Ethiopia in March of 2007. I haven’t traveled internationally since then, and I’ve been itching to go. And looking at those sweet little faces made that itch even more pronounced.

Sometimes, it’s easy to get bogged down in my work. To stare down deadlines. To get entirely too focused on where an apostrophe goes, or what a transition between paragraphs should look like.

But all it takes is one look at those sweet faces. And worries about commas and deadlines are replaced by their stories.

Stories of hope and perseverance. Stories of faith and diligence. Stories of unbreakable bonds between a mother and her child.

And it is then that I realize the worst thing I can do is to lose focus of why I do what I do. I don’t do it for the bylines or for the praise. Because if I did, I would have already given up. I do it for them.

I do it because they need an advocate. They need someone to tell their stories. They need someone to respond to their need. They need. So I write.