Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family

by Mitch Albom

There are many kinds of selfishness in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more.

Everything in this world is music if you can hear it. Make a joyful noise, the psalm says.

And maybe because I’m older now, or maybe because your eyes were so much wider than mine, or maybe because it’s simply different when the child is in your care, something stirred. I began to lean over, to see tiny miracles the way you saw them. Baby ducks running. Frogs hiding in the weeds. The wind lifting a leaf you were about to grab.

One of the best things a child can do for an adult is to draw them down, closer to the ground, for clearer reception to the voices of the earth.

Children wonder at the world. Parents wonder at their children’s wonder. In so doing, we are all together young.

Families are like pieces of art, they can be made from many materials. Sometimes they are from birth, sometimes they are melded, sometimes they are merely time and circumstance mixing together, like eggs being scrambled in a Michigan kitchen. But no matter how a family comes together, and no matter how it comes apart, this is true and will always be true: you cannot lose a child. And we did not lose a child. We were given one. And she was glorious.