LOVE

We got a call about a month ago that sent our emotions reeling. Our daughter is alive, safe, and there is again potential for her to come home. All we had to do is say "yes." And even though I know that she is still my daughter, I was scared. I feel like we've been on a roller coaster for over a year, and I just didn't know if my heart could take one more major climb with the potential for another major drop. I was afraid to hope.

But I know that she is mine. Is there potential to have our hearts broken further? Yep. Even if she does come home there is no promise of reciprocated love. There isn't even a promise that she will be stable enough for us to be able to provide the best care for her. She could be a huge ball of emotion, and hurt, and fear, and regression, and chaos. But I look at her picture and my heart aches with love that is overwhelmingly inexpressible. She is mine. I love her. I may be scared of what me loving her looks like, but that doesn't make my love for her go away.

With shaking hearts and quiet voices we said that we were in. With good reason, people tried to talk us out of this. But she is ours, whatever the cost of comfort, reputation, heartache, security, peace. She is ours, forever and ever.

Then a month passed with conflicting impressions of what we should do. And communication is spotty at best. And we live attached to our phones and computers, waiting to hear anything. Expecting to travel any day. Hoping to travel before her birthday. Knowing it was becoming less likely with each day that ticked by. I try not to be angry with my husband when he looks practically at things and tells me it's a pretty slim chance that we will have her home before her 14th birthday.

Hope feels foolish. It's stepping out into a cloud filled sky trusting that a thin piece of fabric and a couple cords will keep you from being destroyed by gravity.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick... - Prov 13:12

My heart is sick from hoping. I hope that she will come home soon. I hope for a call that it's time to make travel plans. I hope for favor with random bureaucrats who have the ability to tell us we aren't her parents. I hope that decision isn't made arbitrarily. I hope for her heart to be healed. I hope for the chance to be a good mom. I hope to some day tell her how much my heart has ached for her. I hope for a day when she will know I am her momma just as surely as I know she is my baby.

On the good days, my faith is shaky. I know all the right answers, but I hurt, and I doubt, and waves of fear threaten to cover me completely. I know that I love her, not because I chose to but because that's what God made me for. I know that I hope for her to come home not because it's easy, but because God made my heart for this. I now know why God made me with this intense, insane love that just splashes out uncontrollably sometimes. How else could I look at a picture of a beautiful girl and know that she is mine and love her with every ounce of my heart? I know now why I hope for extraordinary, impossible things that others think are foolish. How else could I hope for my daughter to come home with just the slightest bit of shift in that direction? Even as I want to give up on this impossible dream, I cry out for more hope for a miracle. I beg for more faith that God is working out his plan, to give me a future AND hope.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. - 1 Corinthians 13:13