Trust is a Father
He came home from a morning prayer meeting and said “I think we need to go now.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. It was as if I’d lost nine years’ work in nine seconds. Back again to newlywed – nearly heart-dead from crafting schemes to win him to my ways. All so that I wouldn’t have to trust.
“Now?” I said. Although my four-page trip prep checklist was nearly completed, we still had no sign of a court date. And the Ugandan courts closed July 15th (just a three short weeks away) for the summer recess. If we went now, we chanced staying months in-country and breathing in all the emotional and financial expenditures that come from raising a family of four (or six) in temporary living quarters.
So I grilled him.
Why now? Where did this thought come from? Is this direction from God or just a boyhood craving for adventure?
Woman reverted back to girl, as if my wedding dress were freshly boxed. I looked at him as an opponent seeking to rob my security, more than the proven ally he was.
Nothing about adoption is safe.
Latest Morning Chai Devotion
My Guard {an adoration meditation}
I sit with my Bible in my lap and my head rested back against the chair, eyes casing the ceiling. I am so far away from understanding Your peace, I moan. My mind rolls round and round the same old topics, trapped. My heart has been in knots, I’m realizing for days, as I live within the small world my fears and anxieties have created for me.
How do I claw my way out of this?
It’s right here that I adore.
He brings me to a place I’m not meant to understand, but that I can receive when I adore.
Adoration takes me out of my thoughts and into His.
So, here goes.
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer ..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.
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Recent Postings
Life’s Advent
She bristles, still, when I hold her. I kiss her stiff flesh and remember that friend who prayed “set yourself for 10 years of restoration” just before we left to go get her.
I run my hands across my thirty-five year-old midriff at the comment of one who said “you prayed, and didn’t get pregnant” — past tense, as if that door was sealed shut. I’m still praying, I whisper to my weak heart.
I stir soup in between folding another load of laundry, with my planner cracked on the counter, patiently waiting for my attendance to an item on its list. I type here, in between a screen full of open windows and with one leg ..read more
Love Suffers Long
“And, Jesus, for the men downtown who are poor and brokenhearted. I pray for them. Let them see you, right now. Let them know that you can heal their broken hearts right now, even if they don’t get any money.”
The irony of this prayer that shot out of the back-seat, behind me, was that this was the child for which I’d been recently interceding: Lord, heal the broken parts of her heart. Teach her to find you when her circumstances don’t bend. That morning, she’d climbed the emotional scales from 0 to 10 in no time — in the face of disappointment, her emotions becoming a runaway train. “It’s a bad, bad day, Mommy!” she’d declared ..read more
When December is Cold
[I wrote this post last week when walking through my own remnants of December-pain. I shudder to think of that mother who is standing over her child's grave today. Though my own pain is nowhere near hers, it seemed fitting to still run as planned.]
The first time December broke was when I managed to fit all twenty-one years of myself back into my parents’ bed, right between them — in the middle of the night after that horrid phone call.
“Sara, Renee’s dead,” she’d said, on the other end of my parents’ phone-line, at one o’clock in the morning. My body shook.
Gone? Like that? Hours before, we’d told stories around her kitchen table with Bibles cracked and gifts ..read more
That Night, This Year
[This year, in the space we've already created for story, it only seemed fitting to slide our Christmas letter right in here, alongside all the other pieces of our little scrapbook.]
One picture we took captures our year.
She wore sequins and a flashed a smile, lit brighter than this new dress of hers from Nana and Grandpa. She took careful steps and stood, poised, shoulders-back, almost elegant — if a seven year-old could be called such.
“Excuse me ma’am, excuse me sir,” she said, as she scooted past suit pants and high heels and ducking arms clutching fancy bags. She had little understanding of just where we were taking her and we were not so certain this ..read more
Of Stella … and Links
Oh, friends, you continue to midwife this child who is more than just her story. Thank you.
You shared her story in your space. You lifted up His name. You called it to your tribe’s attention. (You made it fun!) And you prayed. You are still praying!
And He moved. He is still moving.
To date, just under $15,000 has been raised for the Wilkerson’s adoption, for Stella to come home!
All the while, the fundraising continues.
Two high school girls in Virginia have made it their class project to raise money for Stella’s adoption. Today, just hours ago, they shared her story with their whole school at chapel. (Really, they shared His story with their whole school at chapel.)
And two stylists at ..read more
He’s Happy
{Friends who have midwifed this child with us, a Stella update is coming …and it’s so good. Keep telling the story!}
Underneath their skin, my children carry a more pronounced version of the rest of us.
They spin, fast, on their bikes and climb tall trees and squeal when the woodpecker finds his lunch on our back-porch feeder. They play dress up and build forts and get their fingernails dirty even when they aren’t out in the dirt. They are kids. Normal kids.
But they have been weathered by life, and without the social sophistication which age produces, when their rusty parts creak underneath the painted-over exterior, they don’t know to hide them.
We bleed in our house. Some days, often. ..read more
Thanksgiving: A Day To Hunger
When the feast is spread, wide, across the table, spilling over onto little children’s laps and smeared across fingers and faces and filling our bellies, I want to remain hungry.
Because He satiates in such a way that we can both be filled, and hunger for more.
On a day when the world stops to give thanks, I want to move that little corner of my blog over here — front and center — to lift up a memorial.
He doesn’t need it, but He loves it. And my insides are stretched when I do it.
When we adore – when we lift our words and our eyes and our life up at Him, with His Word as the starting place — ..read more
“Can ya’ dance?”: A New Place of Thanksgiving
I stood on the stage, a slip of a thing in those days, all 50-something pounds of me spotlighted. I’d finished my audition song and waited for the voices to break through the pitch-black theater.
“So, can ya’ dance?” bellowed one, the show’s director.
Up from within my bony frame came one confident reply: “YEP!”
I can’t remember my emotions in that moment and I’m not even sure I can remember that moment. Like the stories that mothers tell their babies to shape their understanding of childhood when they are no longer babies, this memory was hers. Her little sprite who’d never known dance lessons stood boldly under those big white lights.
My daddy had told me that I ..read more
Reclaiming Wonder
Twenty minutes felt like hours, as I stood under the canopied expanse of the Michigan sky in my long-johns and layers and considered a decision that would forever alter the course of my life. Day-old snow crunched under my boots as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other to keep warm.
Like any fifteen year-old with barely a decade of memories behind me, the scale of my decisions ranged in degree from choosing a prom dress to planning what I might do this Friday night. On any given day, either could be weightier than the other.
In between the tears that dropped, one by one off my cheek and onto my woolen mittens, I ..read more
The Name They Will Share
[Though uncharacteristic of this space, this and my previous post are part of something that is very close to my heart. Would you read through to the end?]
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The name they gave her — this speechless toddler roaming the streets of war, searching for refuge for herself among all those refugees — meant despised.
She wasn’t old enough to speak her given name, so her new situation named her.
In a culture where names come from life-circumstances, not baby books, a name is a branding.
Her infant-years were easily erased and re-branded in red, a forever-continuing reminder of the death that stole her inheritance. More accurately, her new name — given by a stranger — indicated that her birth ..read more
Will You Midwife This Child?
[Friends who have followed this blog will know that the following post is slightly uncharacteristic for this space. This "ask", however, is one that is deeply personal and one that's just about making me burst. Read and marvel at how He weaves a story ... and please pray and ask if He would have you participate. Under His leadership we don't need to beg or persuade, we simply need to lean and trust; if He wills it, He'll do the nudging.]
While I sipped Starbucks and slept deep, wrapped in down, these girls formed a sisterhood not around bloodlines, but from blood spilled.
They made rocks and sand their playground and promised with their lives, not their ..read more
When The Thread Hangs Out
( … a post for all of us with shards of orphanhood that creep into our heart, and as we prepare for this weekend’s “Orphan Sunday.“)
I read her story online, this stranger who let me — and hundreds, if not thousands of others — behind her mourning veil. The tragedy of her child’s death made me shudder. This uncomfortable pain was too much for me and, in that moment, I felt relief that she was a stranger and not a friend.
Because she wasn’t in my kitchen, I could look away.
And so I did.
Then that night I faced pain of a different kind — except, this time, I couldn’t look away.
She wrapped herself up in a ..read more
The Baby Books We Make With Our Prayers {with printable prayers for our children}
We named her Hope and He tethered us with a name we couldn’t change.
She was birthed in Africa’s dirt and lived more life and death in her five years than some see in their thirty-five. She saw blood before it stained and talked of bodies, when breath had left them and the ground absorbed them, as casually as if it were a Sunday ceremony. The girl we’d named Hope was shackled by a story that spoke the opposite.
And He picked me, this one who’d made a habit out of fear, to mother her.
Her days wore the scars you’d expect from her history and I was called to restore them. Hugging and holding, looking directly into ..read more
What Does It Mean To Feel Safe?
He crawled on all fours, trying to blow up and out of his eyes the edges of the blanket that were covering his view, unsuccessfully. His Mary was main-stage, now, and currently had little concern for her transportation. She had a baby to birth.
They recited fractured lines of scripture in between giggles, under a flashlight that was their Bethlehem Star, and made no explanation for why this hay-trodden birthplace had a giraffe instead of an ox or ass. Joseph wore a kimono.
Forming traditions when we have “firsts” at years five and seven of life has kept things light.
But for one, this little … performance … was loaded. She’d sunken back into herself, her body language telling ..read more
My Book Stacks
In the transition from vocational ministry to who-knows-what, I found myself stocking shelves and cashing orders at a little boutique in North Barracks Road which sold French and Italian pottery and linens. This was the last place a college-educated and fiery-in-her-faith woman should be spending her twenties, I thought.
But it was exactly what I needed: rest, amid stacks of Provencal placemats, farm-kitchen platters and ceramic roosters that sold quicker than we could keep them on the shelves.
In my first few weeks there I busied myself during down-time hours — which was most of the day for a specialty boutique whose few regular customers kept the lights on. I dusted plates and re-arranged cups and saucers and kept the shelves ..read more
The Beauty in Another
The house was swelling with song and the windows were sweating from the collision of packed bodies in a small brownstone space against the stark winter air. I didn’t think we were going to a house party, I thought, my dander already up.
We entered to the sounds of well-known worship — translated through what sounded like a more “local” band. The furniture had been moved to accommodate the standing guests and the musicians’ equipment. This was a cross between a concert and a modern-day church service. Some watched and others participated, but the mood was generally festive. Nate and I exchanged looks that held questions. We attempted to take one another’s temperature through an eyebrow raise and a ..read more
Loving What Is Not Ours … Until It Is
We hedged him in tonight, each of us on either side, and his mouth tried to hide the smile that his eyes proclaimed.
It had been a rough night for him. He was nursing a pout, but getting sandwiched in between Daddy’s body — still wet with gym sweat — and the late-night version of me eventually brought out his squeals, all giddy.
This was my kid’s Disney World.
In every picture and video we had of him before the day we first held him, his face hung. We didn’t know until much later about the reasons behind the weight he wore, but this child came to us with a wall that felt almost impenetrable.
And though I’d taken ..read more
The Best of Days
It was an hour drive between Charlottesville and Richmond on a day that my wedding rings hadn’t yet worn a ridge into my finger. This was a blink compared to our longer road trips, but something about no exit plan at a highway pace made our car a recurring greenhouse for marriage growth.
Some of my best memories happened over “windshield time”, as a dear friend coined these free dates.
But best to me, then, was not how I’d define best now. What I now see as best was often “worst” for me then. I’d renamed conflict, “trouble”, and couldn’t see how these relational rifts were opportunities if we walked them out. (I’d mastered avoiding pain.)
So here we ..read more
A Garden Made From Broken Pieces
She’d had a secret to tell me all afternoon. She was saving it for bed-time, when her sisters sharing her room felt miles away as we whispered, nose-to-nose in her bed.
“Mommy, I’m really sad,” she said, eyes big and brimming with tears.
“Her Mommy and Daddy … they died. She has no one.” She spoke of this tragedy as if it was far from her experience and I was distracted with this thought: were her recent cushioned-years allowing her to speak as if this was other, not familiar?
“We have to pray, Mommy. She has no one,” she said with urgency.
This child across the ocean, a friend of Lily’s, had a story that stuck in Eden’s craw. ..read more
He Remembered
I don’t know her first word. I don’t know when she rolled over or started to crawl. I didn’t see her crack her first smile.
Those milestones mark the first year of life. What about years two, three, four, and on?
And if they are here today and gone tomorrow — in just one blink — how do I mark my time with her when already-short time is shortened?
Sometimes I hold her face in my hands and I want the world to slow its beat to this one moment. Those hours that babies study the creases on their mother’s faces aren’t wasted, they are foundational.
Can we have those back?
She feels it too. I watch ..read more
Where Is Your Beauty?
We fingered the rocks tucked deep in the folds of our pockets — all of us, adults and children, as the lake wind whipped against our bodies. The clouds hung low and the air whistled through the trees bowing low to the water. The rocks offered opportunity for us to join their genuflect.
Each rock symbolized a sin. I knew my pockets weren’t deep enough this day.
Of all days, this one went sour early. I left my morning quiet with big prayers and big intentions only to find my flesh louder than either of those on this day. I was irritable. I sought only to manage their behavior, not reach their hearts in the meantime. I ..read more
Why I Adore (the conversation continues)
The late-summer sun hung hot over the Blue Ridge, but this little valley was nestled far enough in its shadow that we felt some temporary reprieve. Men with sweat-kissed faces, old college chums maybe, gathered under the tent’s center strumming their banjos and singing vaguely familiar songs among the long tables of local farmers’ hard work, on display. We bought tomatoes and basil and jugs of honey — our grocery needs had recently multiplied.
We were a family; now four, no longer just the two of us.
I clasped a hand of each of theirs, breathing in this moment. These early-family vignettes where I could lift my head above the clouds of adjustment and revel in what He’d ..read more
Hope Does Not Disappoint
(I’ve taken back the mic …and changed my husband’s password. These antics of his surely will not happen again.)
“I want to be born again,” she said — big girl language from a little girl’s frame. Our Hope was getting baptized, one week before her 7th birthday, months after she said “yes” to Jesus as Lord in her life, and one year after she gained a father.
I thought this child would be my unravelling when she made herself vomit on Nate, just days after we got her. She had all the signs of a child who’d never known how to attach to another human being and I wondered what kind of bridge we’d need to build across a ..read more
Late-Night Sara (A Hacked Birthday Post)
Today is Sara’s birthday, and as her husband, I thought that one of the many things I can do to for her, to celebrate, is to hack her blog. (Well, in truth, it’s not really hacking when you have your own password ).
Happy birthday, my dear wife. And now might be the time to avert your eyes.
Anyway, when we started this thing back in 2007, it was meant to simply keep family and friends of ours up to speed on our adoption of two children from Ethiopia (Eden and Caleb). But somehow, in the midst of that process, this thing became much, much more.
Now, I’m a marketing person. If I had my druthers, Sara ..read more
When Marriage Rubs Us Raw (An Anniversary Post)
This fishing rod was to be an olive branch.
On the way out the door to go get it, days before his birthday, we had another rub. The same conflict or a new conflict, I wasn’t sure. They had begun to blend, all of them, into one great echo. Would we ever come out of this?
While we shared a common love — many, in fact — the way we approached life in both the big and the small was different. He found God while hiking the Blue Ridge mountains and trampling snow in the dead cold of winter to gather branches for his wood stove. He loved rooms full of people and drank life from history and ..read more
Finding Great in the Small
My dad taught me to love the ocean.
The smell of salt water is synonymous to me with the smell of his skin, despite the fact that 358 days of the year we were hundreds of miles away from the shore. That one week left an impression that lingered long.
My most memorable moments with my dad, other than long talks on our stiff living room furniture away from the hub of activity in our house, were of the sun setting on our freckled bodies, clinging to the raft that kept us afloat. The waves were as tall as he was in my memory.
The ocean was the ball field of my childhood.
“One more, Daddy! Just one more ..read more
