If the way to announce a pregnancy is to post a picture of a positive home pregnancy test, then is posting a picture of paperwork the way to make an adoption annoucement?
Baby #2, we’re getting ready for you!
What a Story
December 12, 2011 By 7 Comments
I haven’t stopped thinking about this video since I watched it:
It’s powerful, to me, for two reasons.
1. The miracle of adoption is making a family out people who otherwise wouldn’t be family. Adoption is redemption. Watching this young woman’s reaction upon hearing she would be a permanent part of a family is just plain moving. He sets the lonely in families!
2. But more importantly, it’s such a picture of the Gospel. What that daddy says to his new daughter is what Jesus says to us:
You are loved. You are valuable. You were created ON purpose and FOR a purpose. And us? You and me? This thing is forever. You are mine for always.
I will never stop praising Him for allowing me, the worst of all sinners, to be a part of such a story.
Thanksgiving Eve
November 23, 2011 By 1 Comment
Last year at this time, we were tucked into a room in a West Des Moines, Iowa, roadside hotel staying the night to wait out an epic Midwestern ice storm before the final leg home.
We ordered a pizza and ate it on the bed while Harry slept in his infant car seat.
In my memory, it feels like we spent days and days in hotels, but it was really only four nights. Two in Salt Lake City, a night somewhere in Nebraska, and that last night in Iowa. We were back home less than a week after he was born. But those days on the road with our newborn son loom large and mythical in our minds.
On Thanksgiving morning, we awoke and ate the free breakfast in the lobby, sitting among a large family who was obviously having some sort of holiday family reunion. I wore Harry in the Sleepy Wrap and Aaron made waffles and we practiced being a family.
As we drove north toward Minnesota we saw cars in ditches and road signs coated in thick layers of ice, remnants of the storm that had blown through the days before.
We stopped for lunch at a Perkins in Owatonna, where I ordered a turkey dinner and Harry slept the entire meal in his bucket seat.
We arrived home that afternoon, a family of three.
This sign greeted us as we pulled into the driveway:
A year later, on this Thanksgiving Eve, I danced around the kitchen with my almost-toddler son to the Beatles and worked on our holiday card featuring his toothy grin.
I’ve never been more thankful in all my life.
{Today I am thankful for …}
23. His lavish mercies that He pours out again and again and again.
One Year Later
November 20, 2011 By 4 Comments
How do I encompass the past year in one post? How do I adequately express the way that our lives have changed, from the subtle to the extraordinary, in 500 pithy words?
I guess I don’t.
As I was driving Harry to daycare on Thursday, a pack of blueberry muffins and his “1″ crown in the back hatch, I had an epiphany.
We talk often about God’s faithfulness, and how our story is an example of it, but I realized that all this time, I’ve had it all wrong.
Our story is not about how God has been faithful to me. It’s never been about me.
It’s about Harry.
Even in just his short life, God’s faithfulness is drawn all over it. From protecting him in his birth mother’s womb. To giving her wisdom to make the choice for life and the choice for adoption. To pouring out His peace on her. God knew that Harry needed a family, and we are so blessed that He called us.
On our second anniversary, in May 2010, Aaron told me that he still wasn’t ready to move forward with adoption. I cried so hard that day that I broke all the blood vessels around my eyes. My husband didn’t understand. “I didn’t say no,” he said. “I just said ‘not yet.’”
This is significant to me when you consider that I never shed one tear not once over a negative home pregnancy test. (And there were many.) But that day I cried so long and so hard that my tears left a mark. Because I knew without question that adoption was the plan for my life, and I didn’t understand why I was having to continue waiting.
A few months later, leaving yet another doctor’s appointment with no good news, I called Aaron and said, “I’m done with this. Let’s move on.” And this time he was ready too.
We moved quickly. I flew through the home study paperwork, and every typical hurdle was easily cleared. Our social worker was able to schedule our in-office home visit and our at-home visit within days of each other. Our FBI background checks came back in mere weeks, whereas some couples wait for months. Because we’d lived in another state within the past five years, we had to get additional background checks completed as well. Our social worker, when she heard they’d be coming out of Atlanta, was not optimistic, as there are a few cities that are notoriously slow. They were back in record time.
A printer that works regularly with my previous Georgia employer offered to print all our profile books at no cost to us.
I sent off completed applications while our social worker was writing our home study, so that when it was ready, we simply had to send a copy of it to the agency. We sent it it to them in early November 2010.
So when my phone rang on the afternoon on Nov. 19, I thought that was why she was calling. To confirm the recipt of all of our stuff.
Not to tell me that a baby had been born. A baby who needed a family.
It was all, really, in His time. Had we been ready any later, we wouldn’t have been available.
One of the children’s books that I read to Harry has a line where the mama fox tells baby fox that she thinks baby fox’s birth mother prayed for her (mama fox), as much as mama fox prayed the birth mama fox.
“I think she prayed for me as much as prayed for her.”
I know that He heard both our prayers. And that we were both then, and now, and always will be, praying for him.
Orphan Sunday 2011
November 6, 2011 By 3 Comments
Today is Orphan Sunday.
Last year on this day, I wrote this.
More than anything I want tho have HIS heart for adoption, but the truth is: His heart is a heart of rescue. Christ SAVED us from an eternity of orphanhood; from being fatherless for all time. He brought us back to our Father! The story of adoption in the gospel IS a story of rescue.
But I see it another way. I am the one being rescued in this story of our adoption. I am being rescued from a lifetime of being only a mother in my heart, not in reality. I am being rescued from a lifetime of childlessness.
I was once an orphan too. I was dead in my sin, and without an eternal father. But Jesus found me, and brought me home to my Father.
12 days later, Harry was born. And with his birth, and his first mother’s selfless choices, first to choose LIFE and then to choose for her son a family, I became a mother.
One of our favorite things to do is to have a family hug. I hold Harry on my hip and Aaron wraps his arms around both of us, and we put our heads on his broad shoulders. (And then we say, “Family hug!”) I wish I could describe to you the way Harry’s eyes light up. How he grins. How my heart swells to bursting.
We are made for this. We are made to be part of a family. To belong.
Orphan is such a loaded word; it is a word that sits heavy in my gut. I think it’s because the concept of orphanhood —- the state of belonging to no one — is such an anathema to God’s heart that it should grip tightly around ours.
Today, we watched North Point’s Church Online. Harry woke up from his morning nap shortly after the service started, so I went up and brought him down. He sat on my lap, mesmerized by the music.
Soon the worship leaders were singing, “God you are faithful.”
I nuzzled his neck, kissing his check, his sweet little hand patting my arm. Here was this baby, in footie PJs with eyes still sleepy from napping, sitting on my lap. This baby who calls me mama. And I let myself cry, really cry, over what He has done.
I am so unworthy. And yet.
None of this was His plan. Not infertility. Not death. Not decay. Not disease. Not destruction. Not orphanhood.
But He was and is and will still yet redeem. Repair. Restore.
“I will not leave you as orphans,” Jesus said. “I will come for you.” (John 14:18)
And this is my promise to my children, whoever and wherever you may be. I will not leave you. I will come for you. I’m coming.
{Today I am thankful for …}
6. The miracle of adoption. That He would see fit to make me his own.
