So Far...

Our adoption agency asked if I could write our story for their blog. Of course, I said YES! The prompt was mildly overwhelming, "focus on what God has brought you through and taught you in the process". I should just point them to the previous 188 posts, but I will attempt to summarize our 3+ year journey. Here's what I submitted:

Our journey has been devastating. Our journey has been heart-wrenching. Our journey has been utterly transformational in our marriage, our finances, our mindset, our passion, our future. Our journey has been defined by waiting and loss and hope in God and disappointment and joy.

A thousand times we have said, "we would never wish this kind of pain on our worst enemy, but we'd do it all over again and we are beyond grateful." Our journey began with the dream of starting a family. It turned into the confusion of infertility and countless medical tests, procedures, and failures.

But long before we carried the title "infertility", God had also planted a dream in our heart for adoption. Throughout our infertility treatments, we knew that when we reached a certain point in our treatment, we would pursue adoption. When our last procedure failed, we immediately, whole-heartedly jumped into adopting a baby girl from Ethiopia.
We always knew Africa. We always knew a baby girl. But God shaped our dreams toward Ethiopia and for 2 little ones. Through the metaphor of a butterfly, God taught me about the transformation my soul needed from one form into another. I am a different wife than I was 3 years ago when we started trying to start a family. I'm a different pastor, friend, sister, and daughter. And I know I will be a different mother because of the challenge and transformation of this journey.

Today, we bite our fingernails (for so many reasons!) awaiting the arrival of the 2 beautiful little ones God's prepared since the beginning of time to be our children - and us their parents. In many ways the journey is only continuing, but we are different people now then we were when we began 3 years ago.

Grateful. Broken. Healed. Strong. Tender. Changed. We are...

It Takes a Whole Village...

For the past 6 weeks I've wanted to brag on our community a little bit because of how awesome they are! Seriously, our friends have walked us through the thick and think, pains and celebrations, every single seemingly meaningless detail - they have cared about. It moves me to tears to even think about how they have expressed such real love for us and our babies over the past 18 months.

When it came time to "announce" our referral, our small group was among the first round of people we were dying to tell. We found out about our referral on a Monday morning and planned on telling our small group on Tuesday night at small group. It was an agonizing 36 hour wait, but totally worth their reactions...

We made the announcement by presenting these t-shirts [below] to them. Brian calmly pulled each t-shirt out of a bag and excitedly announced that WE GOT OUR REFERRAL and they were finally going to be ah-gots [uncles] and ah-kasts [aunties]! Shock and awe and screaming and laughter and tears erupted! This is a picture of our amazing small group: Tony and Erin [left] and Loc and Christina [right].

After the intitial shock wore off, they wanted to know every single detail. This beautiful picture of me with my eyes closed is describing the past 36 hours and our kiddos. Erin got her kids out of bed to hear the news! You can see Christina here totally being Christina - thoughtful, introspective, totally crying, and overwhelmed at God's faithfulness.
The next morning I got to tell our staff at Newsong. I had already told my staff [minus Abe who was on vacation...SAD!], so when I made the announcement to our entire staff these guys ripped off their 2nd layer shirts to proudly display their new Ethiopian ah-got and ah-kast shirts.
This last pic is just another classic example of how supportive my girlfriends are. Christina and Erin held my hand through Babies R Us, carefully helping me select the 2 items I need from a walls of 100s of items. In a little over an hour, I registered for most everything we need for them. True love! NOTICE: I'm wearing my very own "eh-my-ay"/mama t-shirt that Erin got for my last birthday!!I have to say, we have the best village ever to bring our babies home. Though it breaks our heart not to have biological family in the area, our understanding of family is so much deeper and wider than blood...in more ways than one! :)

3 Dirty Words

Brian and I have had lots of conversations about parenting...obviously! One of the things that comes up a lot for me is my strong, involuntary reaction to 3 dirty words that I do not want to use with our little ones: nice, perfect, hurry. Let me explain...

• NICE - I don't easily trust nice people. I've known my fair share of "nice" people, and Christians are often [even subliminally] taught to be nice, but I don't see that characteristic in Jesus at all. And "nice" is definitely not a Fruit of Spirit. Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness - YES, but not nice. I do trust kind, good, and gentle people. I guess I've seen under nice is unauthenticity, fakeness, and often anger. I've found that nice people are often trying to be nice, but underneath that is all kinds of gook.
  
  I also read a book by Lynne Hybels several years back called "Nice Girls Don't Change the World", and I nearly got whiplash from bobbing my head as I read each page. Essentially, Hybels was preaching that as little girls [and boys, I suppose, but to a lesser degree] we are taught not to ruffle feathers, push the status quo, and be what everyone around you wants you to be. My aversion is probably a reaction to my people pleasing expertise, but also to my passion to see our kids exhibit the fruit of the Spirit's work in their lives, not just behavior modification.
  
  So, at the end of the day, I don't want to tell Lil' A to be "nice" to his sister. I want to challenge him to be gentle and loving and kind.
  
  
• PERFECT - This word is deeply ingrained in me to. I've found over the years of interacting with my friends' kids that when they do something right, my first reaction to say "perfect!" Perfection is the furthest value or expectation in the world that I wish to instill upon our kids. I want them to do their best, focus on progress not perfection, and learn to live free from the constraints of coloring in the lines.
  
  Theologically, I understand that this sinful tendency is traced back to the Garden when the first people bought into the lie that they could "become like God" [Genesis 3:4] - pure perfection. It's an impossible standard and one that I don't want to set up for my children. I want them to learn and feel and internalize their desperate need for GRACE at an early age, so the less I impress perfection on them, the better they will grasp this central Christian concept.
  
  
• HURRY - My last big dirty word. I know this one will be really, really hard for me. If you know me well, you know that I live at Mach 2 speed. I get a lot done in a day. I walk fast. I drive fast. I shop in record time [My grandma loves to tell stories about shopping with me as a little girl and how "efficient" I was at selecting what I wanted!]. I love to optimize my time. Multitasking is something that I practice NOT doing.
  
  Yet, I know with little legs and little feet and the playful meandering of children makes understanding this word an impossibility. And every time I hear an adult say "hurry up" to a child, I wonder if a moment of their childhood is stolen from them. There's plenty of time for hurry - just not in childhood. Childhood is for playing in dirt, and dancing down a hallway, and exploring new territory, and slowly tying shoes, and losing track of time.
  
  Controlling my tongue to not scream "HURRY UP!" at our kids is going to be a hard lesson for me to learn. It's gonna challenge my Type A, activistic, achieving, and task-oriented personality. But it's also going to bless my nurturing, restful, utterly playful, and silly personality.
  

At the end of the day, I know I'm going to say these 3 dirty words to my kids and despise myself for it. At the end of the day, I know I'll do a million other things that scar my kids for life. That's why in addition to a college fund, we want to set up a counseling fund for our kiddos. Kinda kidding. Kinda true. At the end of the day, we'll rest on grace and mercy and God's wisdom to raise these 2 beauties to be all he's created them to be. He's chosen us to be their parents, just like he's chosen them to be our kids.