He Makes Beautiful Things [VIDEO]
To imagine my newly married days with an older child that we’ve just adopted, who also has some special needs, seems mind boggling. I’ve met a woman who knows the grace of God for this very moment. Mamas, when you eke out that “this is too hard” cry, remember there are stories emerging all around us of a God whose strength is made perfect in this ache.
Christina‘s is one of them.
I met her because she helped foster Lily in our waiting period. Our daughters shared a home for a few months and share a God who breathes promises over them every day, despite what the odds might say. I have a deep admiration for Christina, as she is one choosing to see His word over her daughter as the final word. Today you can read her words and watch her story on video. Grab your tissues.
(For the month of May and a week into June, I will be pressing pause on my online writing and this space will become a series of testimonies of what He births in the midst of delay, perplexity and pain. Author friends from around the world, who love words on a page and Him even more, will share, here, how they have seen Him make the bitter, sweet.)
In 2010 I realized that I was just going through the motions. … continue reading ‘He Makes Beautiful Things [VIDEO]‘…
Latest Morning Chai Devotion
Fierce Love
[ this post is a continuation of Love, Unnaturally, from yesterday]
The tears of years break surface when we least expect them.
We were all packed in, beginning our cross-country trip back home, the home they’d now known for months. Out of the blue the one most steady in our grip burst the silence of six sets of eyes absorbing the great-wide highway’s unfamiliarity with her cries.
“Why did she leave me?” she sobbed.
I absorbed the shock. This was a first for her. What triggered this?
“Why did my birth mommy leave me?” she bellowed, her tears turning to wails.
And while I was formulating my response the one behind her joined in, wet-cheeked already, himself. Sympathy or empathy, I wasn’t ..read more
Joy in the midst of waiting. Beauty from ashes. Seeing Jesus’ thread throughout every frame of life. That's what we've been exploring this past decade ... and along the way, we've added to our family -- former orphans, now a son and three daughters.
And in the midst of it all ... I am learning to look up.
Link back here …
Recent Postings
Kindling
I woke up knowing I’d blown it. I walked, head-down, eyes-in to the little room off of our bedroom that witnesses my morning’s first fruits, so often unregulated. I was tired, weak-hearted and yesterday’s pains always feel bigger in the morning.
This one felt exceptionally big.
He’d provided the opportunity for which I’d prayed. I ask Him, often, to be in on their inner-workings. Nate’s and the children’s heart-processing are treasure for me. They partner with Him for me. I want to do the same.
So it came, a vulnerable moment. Another layer of Nate, revealed. A chance to speak life, to put my ear up to the door of His heart and translate the heartbeat on the ..read more
When Love Has Its Way With Us
She elbowed and writhed and pulled at my fingers which were wrapped tenderly around her arm. She shimmied with adrenaline-charged strength I’d not seen before in her, determined not to know the intimacy of my hold or to hear healing words. Her body fought what it needed most.
In between her resisting my embrace and collapsing underneath it, I brushed fingers across her forehead and wiped away tears from overfull ducts. I held her head to my neck, flesh against flesh, my touch an attempt at smelling salts. I wanted to awaken her to that which was more real than her experience of years past: love.
Shame has a way of settling itself into our bones and ..read more
His Thread
The morning had shaped up to be one which witnessed more griping than I’d normally like to see in a month. All the wheels were squeaking. And, so often, days like these fall when the calendar has something fun and unexpected.
Isn’t that the way of the Father — knowing our worst days, ahead of time, ready to surprise with love nonetheless.
We stopped, midstream. Paint brushes in hand and their disgruntled words hanging in the air, I called them to the same thing to which He’s been calling me. The only way to scale that hardened wall.
They’d apologized to me, each of them knowing their words and shoulder shrugs weren’t ignored in our home. But I ..read more
Not Just Above, But In
In every scraped knee, and “mommy, my belly hurts.” In every text from states away with request for urgent prayer, and in the circumstance from a few bedroom doors down in need of urgent prayer. In every lingering chest ache, stirred up by an absent-minded comment. In every to-do list which never got started before the day was finished. In every grand plan, thwarted. In every seeming demotion.
“He is over it all,” we say often. But do we believe He is in it?
The same blood which first coursed when He was made flesh on that starry-night so many years ago, runs its course through me. Every day. Every hour. Every minute is another opportunity for ..read more
Motherhood’s Fuel
[What started as one post has now become three. If you haven't yet, read part 1: The Ache Which Motherhood Reveals and part 2: Holy Gaps, first, before diving into this post.]
The reality of living as a mama of four draped like a dark cloud over me. At least I thought it was the reality of stretching our family’s new flesh across a midriff which still felt tight. I talked to friends and debriefed with Nate all through this lens: it’s just sinking in how hard it is to have four former orphans to raise. Four kids to raise, period, is a lot. I’m overwhelmed with life.
I found myself rushing through and over them to get ..read more
Holy Gaps
[Continuing the conversation from earlier this week ...]
Her hurt hooked me in, again. She looked down and my heart picked up pace. Years of training selflessness, teaching them about a heart focused out and up (not in), were challenged in the face of this child, who just wouldn’t have it on this particular day. She exhaled ingratitude, in spite of my outpouring.
We’d just had a day together, the two of us. We held hands and giggled. She did everything one step behind me, as she’d asked to do so many days. I treasured her — it wasn’t hard — and she lit up. Time spent together was her language of love.
Minutes after we returned home, the questions ..read more
The Ache Which Motherhood Reveals
It was the end of a long day. You’ve had them.
I was minutes away from leaving the house for a Bible study. A way out – an unfiltered thought I received. Mistake #1. Though the scenery might change, I couldn’t leave my heart at home.
She was dustpan-in-hand and song-in-her-mouth, scooping up the last pile her sister had formed. (Life is always a song for this one.) I reached up to put away one last thing from the kitchen counter, with goodbye, on my lips and down it came. Glass crashed and smashed and liquid found its way into corners we’re still cleaning. Liquid Vitamin B stained my planner (a nightmare for an organized-type like me), on its ..read more
“I Make Jesus Laugh”
My mommy and daddy love me soooo much! she penned across the page of her own moleskine journal.
It was a long night, with a fresh new ending. He was making her new and working from the inside out.
She took a misstep, we course corrected, and she had sunk deep instead of coming up and out like our others. Six+ years of being surrounded by other orphans who would point and shout “SHAME” when one of their ranks would falter has left a scar on how she’s seen herself.
Wounds, not yet healed, tend to make themselves known.
A process we’ve just begun, post course-correction, revealed the thoughts infecting her inner-man. My mommy and daddy aren’t happy with me, she ..read more
When God Names Us
When we chose her name, we had a two-dimensional version of her in our inbox, accompanied by four sentences. Three of them spoke of what she wasn’t: clear of HIV, fatherless, and without a real home. Even her picture was indistinct; she wore the uniform of the orphanage that was now her home.
Buried in there was the only information we had on her personality: “she is a very active girl.”
We, like you, chose a name knowing only the gender and that this baby could kick — except for us, she already had five years of life which held mystery. She lost her first tooth in Uganda; we never saw it come in before it left.
Hope, ..read more
An Escape from Escape
“I just heard the sweetest sound,” she sent in text. I’d been praying with her for weeks, since her body first revealed signs of new life, inside. On the heels of two miscarriages, this mama walked headlong into her fears, declaring into her heart a different word.
And, this time, what her heart believed, her body lived. This baby was alive.
What a nuanced situation for me. I celebrated the news. I’d been praying for this baby’s breath to subsist and for this mama’s belief to only grow, against the statistics. But minutes later I felt the gut-punch of grief.
Would I ever hear that sweetest sound?
I dabbled there again, with the place I most dread. But this time ..read more
February Favorites
Almost everything I like quickly becomes a favorite. And because there is always a story, I’ll tell you a little of the background behind a few of my favorite things (this month:)):
Favorite Story of Persevering With a Heart Wide-Open to God This woman and her family have loved Him well. Though I have not met her in person, she and her husband were some of the first to meet our Hope, and they’ve been in Uganda ever since. Yep, that’s almost one year. Some might call the twists and turns of their road nightmarish, but they have chosen to see it as beauty and they haven’t stopped praising Him — while they fought for to one to whom He ..read more
Learning a New Language
The flower didn’t matter much to her, until she lost it.
We had been home from Uganda for a few weeks, stewardship was something slightly foreign to my five year-old’s experience. She didn’t have much to steward on the streets. What I perceived as an opportunity to train little hands to keep carefully the things entrusted to them, was something for which He had planned even more.
After searching high and low for this accessory to her headband, to no avail, my little girl unraveled. She didn’t need to hear that it was her responsibility to have kept watch over it, her posture wore the understanding that her focus on play had trumped stewardship. Shame flooded her countenance. I spoke ..read more
Bare
“I’m embarrassed mommy.”
She was five when she said it.
“When I looked in the mirror just now, satan told me I was ugly,” she replied when I pressed.
This was not a conversation we’d had before and it came way too early, in my book. I wasn’t sure whether to feel relief that she was able to identify this vileness as being from a source other than herself, and other than God, or to mourn over the fact that my sweet little one had fallen prey to femininity’s curse … at five.
We get stopped on the street, often, with comments about her beauty. It’s not something we emphasize, and it’s hard to avoid when strangers spill words before I ..read more
The Love Project
We found each other when life felt carefree, untainted, and we forged a sisterhood over late-night daydreams of changing the world — and sugar. A decade-plus spanned the distance between those high school nights and when we were later reacquainted. As we caught up over phone calls, and, eventually, in-person visits, time revealed that we also shared scars.
I didn’t pray by her bedside when she lost her first baby and she wasn’t there to cry with me when we hit our first year of expectation, childless.
It didn’t take long through the reacquainting to realize that we understood the other’s road, intimately. The parallels during our time apart were uncanny. We both were adopting from Ethiopia. ..read more
I Am Because He Is
I need to get over the feeling of “I can’t” [and move to] “I am.”
What? I read it again. And again.
Her confession cracked open my day. It was His phrase, through her, over what He is doing in my life. I’ve lived a lifetime of “I can’t”, inhaling lies of the enemy spoken over me as if they would one day be declarations on my tombstone.
I had just unknowingly spent more than our budget, spoken unfiltered words to him, and now had a child unraveling at my bedroom door. Failure — it seeped under the doorframe of my heart. A small crack in the wall, untouched by the Father, and before I know it, I’m ..read more
Showing Up
I live in this weird tension of soaking up spills, matching socks and slicing onions (again), all while remaining acutely aware of a hunger inside of me for adventure which I can’t cap. Some days, I’m still in slippers and sweatpants at four o’clock — yet I feel like I spent the day back at the Amalfi coast when the waves crashed just a few feet below our window, carved out of the rocks.
I was made for more than the mundane.
At every stage of life, I’ve been haunted by a desire for something more, something bigger, something that would fulfill empty places within me. It’s made me feel unsettled, this discomfort festering under the surface. ..read more
Her Fireplace
She was widowed young — a mom with a houseful of little ones and no companion with whom to kiss their ouchies and tie their shoes. Her life was shackled with loss. Back then, when I heard about it, I was in college with no understanding of what all of that meant — still, it pained me. What does God do with such life-altering affliction?
I didn’t know her well, but He meant for me to hear her story. I had an unrelenting curiosity about her coping. It touched on a nagging question deep within. That kind of tragedy set against whom, I had been told, was a good God. How? It had to be too much pain for ..read more
Taking Her From The Streets
[Continuing my train of thought from yesterday ...]
Moments of insecurity reveal my street-raised daughter to have a bark louder than her bite. As we learn Him, He teaches us about her and it’s here that we’re finding her gentleness.
Months ago, we started praying into her the opposite of what we were perceiving from her behavior. We weren’t looking to directly oppose what we saw, but as we asked Him for understanding into her heart, we realized that much of the whirlwind around her was borne from inertia. She had a dormant beauty which never had reason to surface.
And I’ve had too many years taking gulps of worst-case scenario expectations, lived-out. This time, I would try ..read more
Losing the Streets
The slum streets were her childhood playground.
Her lungs took their first swallow of earth’s air in the poor African’s version of a waiting room, while her mama held her place in line for a “free-clinic” bed — one that she never saw. Hope was welcomed by this world into the dirt, and it would indoctrinate her first five years of life.
And from what I can tell, she did street life well.
The skill set required to scavenge for food and beg (simply to get by) is quite different, even, than the one needed to slide into the masses of an orphanage food line. To move from streets to shanty-like slums and back again, over and over, ..read more
Never Too Old for Treasure Hunts
“You just wait.”
Eventually, we stopped counting the number of times we were forewarned about our lives “coming to an end” once the little ones entered our home.
Four children later, though, I now understand a little bit better the pain which might cause (what felt like) a curse to come out of the lips of others over our long-awaited family.
Life is all about surrender, at every pass. And whichever ones of life’s props we hold closest to our chest are the ones which cause us the most pain to relinquish. But the myth is that this pain is the final word over surrender. Though my greatest (felt) surrender may not be parenting, all day long I’m tempted ..read more
