The Journey Continues

As you may have noticed, my blog came to a screeching halt several months ago…

To summarize:

Three years ago, I began to feel a stirring in my soul.  A longing.  A desire to know God and to know Him fully.  I began to pray and ask God to reveal Himself to me.  To unite my heart with His.  To show me His glory.  In response, I heard God inviting me into an adventure with Him, to step into the Jordan fully trusting His ability to make my footstep sure, to keep me on solid ground even though the river raged (Joshua 3: 5, 13, 17). 

 

My adventure will be risky, it will be disruptive to your routine life, it will be hard, but we’ll be in it together.  And it will be an adventure, if you trust Me.

What I didn’t know was that God’s glory would come to my house in the form of a child, two children, actually.  Through a series of circumstances, orchestrated only by the One who knows our hearts best, Dave and I became foster parents.  Please do not place us on the foster parent pedestal of sainthood.  There are many out there who deserve such a position, but not us.  We did not set out to be foster parents, but foster parenthood came to us.  Having just recently been certified as adoptive parents, we got a phone call one late October afternoon.  A not-quite-one-year-old boy needed a long-term foster placement, along with his soon-to-be born baby sister.  The chances were high that they might become available for adoption, but there were no guarantees, except that the road would be long and bumpy.  Would we be interested?  We had 2 hours to make this life-changing decision.  We said yes to our adoption worker and yes to God.  And the adventure began.  Less than 24 hours later, little K entered our lives and 2 weeks after that, newborn Baby M joined our newly formed and very raw family.  I’d like to say that I’ve had a heavenly, rapturous experience ever since, but the truth is, my selfishness has been exposed.  I’ve reeled and railed and beat my fists against the ever-closed door of “Why?”.  I’ve looked at my poor, trapped, diaper-bound, naptime-bound, formerly independent self, and cried and asked God, “Why, when I asked for bread, did You give me a snake?  Why, when I longed for honey, did You give me these stones?”  And I sank into the miry clay of selfishness and discontent.  I longed for my simple, routine life. “I wanted an adventure, Lord, not a nightmare.”  But all the while, God held out his hand to me, offering His redemptive perspective.  And I reached for His pinky finger, still dangling above my own selfish desires, but starting to see, starting to hear…

“…it’s the Word of God that turns the rocks in the mouth to loaves on the tongue.  That fills our emptiness with the true and real good, that makes the eyes see, the body full of light.”

~Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

 

***

As the days went by, I continued to seek His perspective, to grasp for His heart.   It went something like this:

Upon finding out that I’m a foster mom, the most frequent comment I hear is “I don’t know how you do it.”  For a long time, I didn’t know how to do it either; I still don’t have it all figured out.  Early on, my efforts with Little K were met with challenging and difficult behaviors: a little heart lashing out at a world that had let him down.  My emotions became entangled in his, and I prayed and I cried and I begged God for the mercy and grace and love to not let him down, too.  This little one pushed and shoved and I wanted to run, but God said Stay, so I did.  I prayed and I cried over and over again as love became hard work, and I knew in the back of my mind that all this hard work, all this loving, might be met with a bitter end, an end that would make all this feel worthless, pointless.  I cried out to God again, looking for a way, looking for an answer.  And He replied,

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?  Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?  Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.  Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and He will say: Here am I” (Isaiah 58:6-9).

And I understood that this work I was doing was “fasting.”  It was hard, it was uncomfortable, it was a sacrifice; it created an emptiness that only God could fill.  The very thing God asked me to do caused me to cry out for His help.  But it was what God had chosen for us, and He promised to be exceedingly available.  The Lord Himself would be my help, the Lord would be my strength.  I began to settle into His arms and the children began to settle into mine.  But the more settled I became, the more each passing comment of “I don’t know how you do it” stuck like a thorn in my heart, threatening to tear it in two, urging me to flee, to build up a wall of defense, to protect myself from the pain that was sure to come, from an ending that was unknown.  Hidden in that phrase is the understanding that we might love and then let go, love and then lose two little pieces of our hearts.  “How do I do it, Lord?  How do I give my all when I don’t know how this will end?”  And He answered,

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.  Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). 

And then, in that still small voice of His, He whispered,

Love them today.  Right now.  Tomorrow is in My hands.  Let it stay there. 

A peace flooded my soul in that moment.  With God’s help, I can do today. 

It doesn’t mean life is easy from here on out.  As God assured me several years ago when He began to prepare my heart for this very adventure, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  But now, when someone says, “I don’t know how you do it,” I say, “One day at a time.  God has asked me to love these kids today, and I can do that.”  I trust in Him and His goodness, and even if my heart will break, I choose to love today.  It’s not about me.  It’s about Him, and it’s about them.  End of story.  No.  Beginning of story…

Shortly after I wrote this, we learned that the dreaded possibility is indeed happening.  The process has begun to transition these little ones back to their birth parents.  Please keep our family, and theirs, in your prayers.