They didn't deserve it and neither do you...but love them anyway

So I am reading reports and evaluations on some kiddos today in hopes of one of my families being a great match as a forever family.  This is one of the hardest parts of my jobs.  I have to read all that these kids have suffered before, and often after, they came into the system we call child "protection".  One particular answer by one of the children has left me in a puddle of tears at my desk.  She is less than 10, and is asked why she came into care.  Her answer: "Because I lied about something."

Oh Jesus, how?  How do we do this to our children?  This precious child of God beleives in her heart that she is in a system that moves her every few months because of something she did!  I am sure worker after worker, and therapist after therapist have told her numerous times that she is in care because of nothing that she did!  But you see these kids are ripe for the enemy's taking!  Because of what the adults in their lives have done or chosen over them, they have a huge void that the enemy runs in and says "It's all your fault!"  They believe in the core of themselves that they are so horendous that no one could love them...not even their own mother or father.

But my tears don't stop for just her, although I could cry a river just on that alone.  My tears stream down my face for all of my friends who are loving these kids!  You see when these kids come into our homes, they are there not because of anything that is their own fault, but becuase of choices of others.  And because of those choices of others, these children behave in ways that can be very hurtful.  They don't know how to love.  They don't know how to trust.  They don't know how to receive love either.  They didn't deserve what these adults did to them...

And the ripple does not stop with these kids.  It now extends to foster and adoptive moms and dads and brothers and sisters who are trying with all that is within them to love this little girl!  Yet in return they get "I hate you!" or they get little jabs like "I love you but not as much as my real mom" or "you're not my family".  Oh friends, they don't mean it!  And even if on some level they do mean it, they don't understand what they are saying!  ...and you don't deserve what the decicions of these adults are not doing to you and your family as you once knew it!

Stay the course!  Do something to give yourself some oxygen!  But don't believe the lies the enemy has told these kids and now wants to scream at you too!  You may very well be the only Jesus they see!  You may be the only true, unconditional love they ever know.  So when they have ripped your heart out, torn it into a million pieces and thrown the pieces back in your face, will you gather those pieces up and take them to your Heavenly Father who sees and knows your pain.  Will you allow Him to mend your heart so that you can then help mend theirs?!  She believes she is in your home because she lied about something...and she believes as soon as she does something just bad enough to you, she will move again.  Hold on moms and dads!  Hold those wounded children and show them the love they may not even know they need.

And if you are not one of these moms or dads loving these children who are in or have been in our foster system, go find someone who is!  Take them a meal, but even better yet, do what you need to in order to give them a child free night just so they can breath again!  Yes, they need prayer, but they need so much more than just your prayers!  They need Jesus with skin on!

And if you are not one of these moms and dads, but God has been calling you into this crazy thing we call adoption, DO IT!  There is a girl who thinks she is in the system because she lied about something!  She needs you to teach her the Truth of God's unconditional and merciful love!  She needs that Truth not just to heal and survive the cruel world she has lived in for her short life, but she needs it to secure her eternity!  If not you, then who?

Lessons on God, Others and Pain from a Slinky!

God uses some of the craziest things to speak to me sometimes!  And this evening in the craziness of getting everyone ready and in bed was one of those times!

Ava had gotten a purple plastic slinky at the dentist today. Side note here.  I took the 7 youngest kids to the dentist by myself today.  Callie was home with a stomach virus so she didn't make her appointment.  Can I tell you that I didn't make it?  After the three year old's complete melt down over having to pick only "one" toy from the toy chest, I sent the SOS telling John to get home ASAP! Just keeping it real! Which really just makes this message all the more relevant on some levels!

Back to the subject.  Ava had chosen the purple plastic slinky as her toy at the dentist.  During the bed time routine, one of the younger ones brings it to me.  It is a mangled mess.  I ask the deliverer of the slinky what happened.  The deliverer of the slinky proceeds to tell me that said child and one of the other children broke it.  I immediately thought of how heart broken Ava will be when she discovers that her prize has been demolished.  I start working feverishly to untangle the mess.  I twist this way.  I turn that way.  But no matter what I do, I can't undo it.  I get a few kinks out, but it is still a tangled mess and looks nothing like the slinky Ava had chosen from the treasure chest....and for the most part is rather useless in this state.

As I was trying to untangle all the plastic curves, God whispered to the deepest part of my soul "This is how I feel when others hurt  you!"  You see, I knew the hurt it was going to cause Ava to discover that her siblings had ruined her toy.  But no amount of wishing or working could erase that two people had exercised free will to destroy something that was not theirs.  No amount of love or desire to protect could keep my two children from hurting my other child. I would have given anything for them to not have done that to her toy.  But even in all my power as the mother of all three children, I could not undo what two had chosen to do in their free will.

The majority of the pain and difficulties in my life over the past 10 years, but truly the last 3, have come as a result of decisions of other people.  I have my own consequences to own due to my own sin and disobedience, but there are many deep, deep wounds that are the results of others.  So many times in the moments when I am truly honest with myself and God, I cry out, "WHY?! Why would you let them do that?  Why would you allow me to hurt in that way?"  And in that moment of untangling a mingled purple plastic toy, God showed me that he never allowed it and that He hurt too!  He showed me that He would have done anything to stop and now to "undo" what His children had chosen in free will to do that caused me pain.  But He showed me that just as my love and desire to shield Ava from the hurt could not stop or undo what had been done by others in free will, so could He not undo what was done to me in free will.

So if you are struggling right now with pain that has been caused by the choices of others, can I tell you that God hurts with you! He is clear in His Word that free will is the way of this world.  He will not force Himself or His ways on anyone.  That person that hurt you was operating out of their own selfish desires.  God did not choose what happened, and He hurts with you now.  He wants to walk through healing with you. He wants to take the pain that was caused by others and use it for His good!

When Ava discovered that her slinky was a tangled mess, she was indeed heartbroken.  As her mother, I responded the only way I knew how to ease her pain, "I will buy you a new one when we find one to undo what had been done."  Can I tell you that God is standing by ready to make new whatever has happened to you?  Can He totally erase what you have been through?  No!  But He does promise in His Word that what the enemy meant for your destruction, He will turn around for your good!  Will you let Him do that today?  Let Him unravel your purple plastic twisted mess and make you knew again!  He hurts where those have hurt you!  Let Him apply His healing balm to those wounds and make you new again!

"Then shall your light break forth like the morning, and your healing (your restoration and the power of a new life) shall spring forth speedily; your righteousness (your rightness, your justice, and your right relationship with God) shall go before you [conducting you to peace and prosperity], and the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard." Isaiah 58:8

They Had a Life Before Gotcha Day

There have been several posts on my news feed about school assignments that are common where they ask for a baby picture and ask questions for which we as adopted parents often do not have answers.  These moments are painful - for them and for us! I know for me they are a reminder that no matter how much I love my children, that love cannot take away the fact that they are adopted.  As hard as we try to make being adopted a very special thing in our family (to the point that Callie used to cry that she was not adopted and hated being biological! Oops! Guess we went overboard at first!), being adopted still means there are missing pieces to the puzzle of their lives. And these assignments pour salt in that wound.

So what do we do with them? As is the case with just about any adoption related discussion, I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all answer.  I think it depends on your child and how he feels about being adopted.  How comfortable is he with that discussion?  But no matter how you decide to handle it, can I encourage you to not send a message that I fear many of us do without even knowing it? Please be careful to not send the message that his life began on Gotcha Day!

I love the Gotcha Day celebrations.  I think celebrating the day our children became a part of our family is something special and definitely worth celebrating!  However, that is not when my children's lives began! They were born somewhere to someone.  Depending on when they came to us they may have had weeks, months or years of life before we even knew about them.  Can I tell you that Gotcha Day doesn't erase that! It sounds absurd, I know.  But how many times when our children ask us something, or an assignment asks us something, do we revert back to something we "know" or something we feel comfortable talking about, which doesn't usually include all the missing pieces that we don't have from their life before us.

I had not really thought of it this way until we adopted a teenager.  She would get angry when we would talk about anything that happened before she came.  We had to have a conversation about the fact that even though I hated that it took 15 years for us to find her, we did have a life before she was in our family. This was hard for her to understand until I asked her if she would be happy if I told her she could not talk about anything during the first 15 years of her life because it made me too sad that I missed it?  I was asking her the question, but really, I heard my voice asking me, "So do you not want to talk about anything that happened for the past 15 years if you are not comfortable talking about her birth mom?"  Ouch!

So what do we do with the school assignments with the questions for which we don't have answers, or the dinner conversations with other kids that are about first words or first foods?  I am not saying I have the answer, but I don't think the answer is to pretend like it didn't happen because it's too painful for us to not have answers! I don't think we need to always revert to Gotcha Day as their beginning just because it's when they began with us.  They did have first words even if we don't know what they are! They did take a first step even if we don't know when it happened! They were a baby even if we don't have a picture!  And while I would love to e-mail every teacher from now until they graduate and tell them that adopted kids have a very hard time with these assignments and it's very insensitive to assign them, that's not the real world.  I cannot follow my adopted children around their entire lives telling people they are adopted so please do not ask them anything about their life before Gotcha Day.

When we talk about those things in our family, we talk about what "could have been" the first word or the first food.  We look at pictures of babies and see if we can find some that look similar and laugh about if they would have that kind of hair or were that chubby. For Toben we have babies who are being carried on their backs and talk about how he probably rode like that on his mamma's back. Is it painful sometimes to not have answers? Yes! But does it change the reality to not talk about it? No! And maybe it's the realist in me, but I would rather them learn to handle the unknowns in their life while they are with me and we can do it together! And what I always want to communicate to them is that their life is perfectly planned and orchestrated by God, their days were numbered before even one came to be - even the days before I entered their lives, even the days before Gotcha Day!

What a Year!

This week we celebrated our one year anniversary in our new home, our new life....in our promised land.  If I had to describe it in one word - SURVIVAL.

And like never before I can relate to the Israelites who after being freed from slavery in Egypt, questioned whether they should have just remained in bondage versus facing the hardships and trials that their new adventure to the Promised Land brought them.

One year ago, I loaded up the van with the four oldest kids living with us and headed six hours away from my husband, my four babies, the majority of my belongings, my home I loved, my new kitchen God had given me, and every person we knew and both sets of our parents which meant all of our support system! But I was excited!  I remember coming up on Sweetwater where there are hundreds of windmills, the new kind that are enormous and white.  However it was dark, so you couldn't see the windmills, you could only see the red lights at the tops of them all blinking.  It was a sea of red blinking lights.  I had an excitement and anticipation swell up in my spirit as I felt God impress on me that the possibilities for all that I longed for were waiting in our new season in our new home and that they were as endless as the red blinking lights on the horizon.

But it took less than 12 hours for those possibilities to begin to seem few and far out of reach! We arrived at 1 am the morning of the first day of school.  I woke up very sleepy and exhausted kids just a few hours later to head to their first day of school in all new schools. We took first day of school pictures in front of the hotel fountain! Not everyone can say that, right?!

 Small town chick had come to big city and didn't have a clue where she was or what she was getting into with traffic that morning.  The elementary kids were 30 minutes late for their first day of school....and it pretty well went like that for the next few months!

We had just taken possession of the house...our stuff and the rest of the family wasn't here yet, but we took a picture on the staircase! I was so excited....then the moving van arrived with all the boxes!

In this year we not only moved away from all friends, family and support, but we encountered some of the biggest trials of our lives.  This year brought the news that our oldest daughter who we left behind in less than great circumstances had been badly beaten up by her boyfriend, and grand-baby number three had been conceived.  We went through two months of making two house payments that consumed over half our paycheck, we fought a custody battle for our two oldest grand babies, watched as our daughter signed termination of rights, started the process to adopt, saw the largest growth in Addy's Hope in five years meaning I would have to travel back to West Texas at least once a month, walked one child through severe morning and anger over our move, and then all the things any move means - new doctors, new child care, new church, endless boxes, redecorating, new paint, and it goes on and on! And beautiful baby number 3 made his debut in this world!

John's first day at work here was just three days after we moved into the house.  It was about noon that day that I realized I had not been left alone with all four of the babies since we had taken custody of the grands.  John had resigned his position to accept his new one just a few days after we had gotten custody of them.  With the transition happening and needing to take time off to not lose it, he was home during most of the time we were packing to move.  I stood in a house FULL of boxes with four children ages three and under wondering how I would ever get unpacked and have any sort of structure to life ever again!

It would be the fist of many times that circumstances would overwhelm me to the point that I would just sit down and cry.  It was all I could do.  In those moments, I became like a grumbling Israelite! It didn't matter what God has for me in the Promised Land, I couldn't see any of it because the circumstances were like the giants that already inhabited my land, and I saw no way around them.  I would have gone back to Midland in a heart beat if it had at all been possible.  None of the promises God had given about the move, none of the potential or possibilities mattered.  I was so overcome by what I saw that faith had no place.  I remember reading about the Israelites and wondering how they could see God do all He had done for them and still grumble.  I don't wonder anymore.  God's hand was all over our move, His hand was all over so many things over the past year, but it didn't matter.  I was still completely and totally overcome with the circumstances of my life.

This year has truly been one of SURVIVAL.  It has been a year of prayers like "God, give me enough strength to get out of bed. God, give me enough energy to make it to when John gets home and there will be another set of hands to change diapers and make sippee cups."  But as I look back over this year, another word comes to mind INTIMACY.  In my need to survive, I pressed into the throne of God like never before.  In my need to just make it one more step on many days, I learned to cry out however many times a day I needed to in order to just make it.  I learned to seek God above all else - because in my moments with Him were when the peace would come.  My moments with Him were when the voices of doubt, fear and insecurity would be silenced....even if for just a few minutes.

And now, 12 months later, there are still many overwhelming circumstances.  But that too has been a lesson of this move....once again learning to live from Heaven to Earth, not looking at circumstances but standing on the promises of God and holding fast to them until circumstance bow a knee and line up with the promises! I have learned to hold to the promises of God found in scripture like never before! I have truly learned what it is for his Word to by my very breath as it is all that kept me breathing!  I no longer ask John to take me back.  I still miss friends and family so badly it physically hurts at times, but as I go back to West Texas, each month, it feels less and less like "home".  Each trip God shows me something else to be thankful for in our move.

But probably the most valuable lesson of the last year is God is faithful!  Even when I don't deserve it, even when I doubt, even when I am whining and complaining, He is still faithful!  I have come to a place  in my spiritual journey where even through the pain of "feeling" deserted, I could still say God is good.  I could still say He is faithful even if I don't see it yet.  Trials that would have left me doubting God's existence - and at times did leave me questioning Him for a moment - were now faced with a belief and stance that no matter what life looks like, I will not waiver in my belief that God is good and He is faithful! He met me right where I was so many times this year with a scripture, praise song or text from an old friend.  He was my everything when it felt like I had nothing.

I know that this season has brought endurance...a trait that I truly struggle with! And just as he has the past 12 months, as I woke me up at 4 and was unable to sleep thinking of all that needed to be done, the first scripture I see is James 1:3 NLT "For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow."  And this morning, as I reflect on the past year, I am thankful!  I am thankful that my endurance has had a chance to grow!  And I am thankful to be able to once again testify that God is faithful, meets you right where you are and stays true to His promises!

And I look forward to the next 12 months.....I am moving into the Promised Land, giants and all!  I am determined to gain all that is mine and not allow the enemy to steal any of it!