Sunny Side of The Stream: Perseverance, Miraculous Pregnancies, and a Precocious Percussionist

With all the dark and shady news of the world, we often like to take a walk on the Sunny Side of The Stream. 

Hope Over Decades: A Wondrous Discovery

On February 21, 1951, Luis Armando Albino was kidnapped while playing in a city park in Oakland, California — lured away, according to his older brother, by a woman wearing a bandanna.

Despite a desperate search, for decades there was no trace of Luis. However, his mother never gave up believing her boy was alive. He remained fresh in the memories of his family, even as new generations entered the scene.

A few years ago, niece Alida Alequin set out to find her uncle.

Alequin got on the trail in 2020 when “for fun” she took an online DNA test that showed a 22% match with a man on the East Coast. But attempts to reach out to the potential relative failed.

Earlier this year, Alequin and her daughter dug in again, uncovering an old photo in the Oakland Tribune of her uncles Luis and Roberto that convinced her she was on the right track. That day, she and her daughter went to the Oakland Police Department; authorities soon agreed her evidence was compelling, and reopened Luis’s missing person case.

This time, Alequin made contact with the man on the East Coast, and DNA testing soon followed with both him and Alequin’s mother. It was a match! Luis Armando Albino had been found!

The woman with the bandanna had flown Luis to the East Coast, where he ended up with a couple who raised him as their own. Luis grew up to join the Marine Corps and serve in Vietnam. He later became a firefighter and is now a grandfather.

Luis held a tearful reunion with his family in July, and was able to see his brother Roger before he passed away in August. Long-lost Uncle Luis doesn’t want to talk to the media, and neither the authorities nor the family is releasing any information about his location or the name he’s been living under. Still, his niece wants Luis’s story told as an inspiration to others.

“I was always determined to find him, and who knows, with my story out there, it could help other families going through the same thing,” Alequin told The Associated Press. “I would say, don’t give up.”   

Hope Out of Tragedy: A Miraculous Conception?

This story opens with a terrible downer. Last October, on the first day of his honeymoon, 23-year-old Nate Kuhlman of Florida was killed while water-skiing.

He and Mari, a Catholic couple who had married only three days earlier, had planned to wait to have kids and actually scheduled their wedding date to avoid getting pregnant. According to the Tampa Bay Times, the period-tracking app Mari used stated she’d ovulated days before the wedding. And yet, on Thanksgiving, a month after Nate’s death, Mari Kuhlman discovered she was pregnant.  

‘This has to be a miracle,” she would tell her in-laws. “God Himself would have had to kick an egg out.” 

On Instagram, she spoke of her amazement at the works of God.

The joys of pregnancy are so hard to articulate so I don’t have much to say other than God truly amazes me and takes my breath away with the way He intentionally created us, especially women! getting to participate in creating a human being by an act of love is truly a beautiful privilege that I’m forever grateful to the Lord for.

Raphael Patrick Kuhlman was born July 18.

Hope That Rock Is Not Dead: Wonderfully Made to Pound the Skins

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well. (Psalm 139:13-14)

By the time I was born, my brother Gus was already a professional drummer. Wanting to imitate my big, cool brother, I would pull out pots and pans and bang away on them with wooden spoons on the kitchen floor. My mom would make sure the curtain came down on those solos right quick.

Perhaps that is because God did not give me a gift for percussion. I was knitted together for different things. Unlike this baby Ringo Starr.

https://twitter.com/Pamuk_Miya/status/1837886762653209032

Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! (Psalm 150:5)

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.