Chosen Ones (Daily Break‪)‬

A newsletter gave Kim Anderson her first glimpse of a boy who would change her life. [paragraph] The boy was pale as snow in a world of olive-skinned, dark-haired children. [paragraph] His hair was white, almost luminescent. [paragraph] Kim, 45 at the time, remembers thinking: "That is our child." [paragraph] The boy had albinism, a condition in which pigment is lacking in the hair, skin and iris of the eye. [paragraph] It was 2002, and Kim and her husband, Steve, saw an empty nest looming in their Smithfield home. The youngest of their two children, Jonathan, was a sophomore in high school; their oldest, Aubrey, was in college. [paragraph] Like many women her age, Kim wondered how she could best use her time in the years when her children went off to college. Volunteer work? Something in her profession as a nurse? A church project? [paragraph] She and her husband prayed for guidance and discussed the question with members of their church, Bacon's Castle Baptist in Surry. The answer was obvious. [paragraph] People have different passions, and Kim's is raising children. [paragraph] She talked with friends who had adopted children, and one shared a newsletter about orphans in China. [paragraph] One boy spoke to her from across the miles. [paragraph] In China, he stood out in a jarring way, but in their family, Kim thought, his pale complexion would fit right in. [paragraph] The Christian agency that did volunteer work and published the newsletter called him Elijah, and he looked about 2. [paragraph] Kim showed the photo to her husband, and he, too, thought this could be the one. Continued on page 6 With those few scraps of information, Kim began to search for the boy.