As told by O.U.R. Founder + CEO Tim Ballard, continued…

“Apparently, I wasn’t done learning this lesson after the operation. When it was over, I was a mess. I was running on three hours of sleep, and I still couldn’t find the relief of slumber.  Bittersweet thoughts raced through my mind…I am so happy we rescued these 28 kids, but Gardy is still missing. How does Guesno do it? What happened to that brother and sister? 

The thought of those two siblings from the operation kept me up into the late hours most of all. I had felt this bond with them, and I couldn’t move past it. (See part 6.)  

As I laid in the Port-Au-Prince hotel room, I prayed for these emotions to be taken away. If we were to get attached to every kid we help, we would never be able to move on. This process usually worked in the past, but the opposite started happening. The more I prayed, the more I saw the kids. The more I saw them with me in the van on the way to the hotel, the more I saw them in the orphanage. I envisioned them in memories I didn’t have. I didn’t know what it all meant.

I decided to call my wife, Katherine, for help. It was two in the morning when I began telling her the story about Guesno. “You won’t believe this guy! I’ve never seen anything like him, if we made a movie about him, no one would believe it. They would say it’s too far fetched. No one would do this!”

“I want to be like him,” I told her. 

Her response surprised me. “You want to adopt those kids!” she said. 

Now, that was not what I was thinking. That idea hadn’t even touched my mind, so I said no! We had six kids at the time, and I travel for work a lot, so I would never suggest that. But my wife Katherine felt it, she knew we needed to do it. She reassured me, “I don’t need to come down there. But you do need to go start the paperwork and bring those kids home.” 

Four years later, Colin and Coline Ballard came home and joined our Ballard family for good.

So this is the important, life-changing principle I learned, the incredible secret of resilience, taught by Guesno and my wife. If we turn to service and forgiveness in the darkest moments of our lives, we can turn the lights on in the darkness. We can have that light that Guesno has. We can heal.