Back again with Marla talking about Jen Hatmaker's book 7: this week is Possessions. But before I go into what thoughts I had while reading this chapter I want to talk about Marla. Marla is a brave woman. Who else would host a read-along about such a conscience challenging book and willingly take on open and honest discussion about things that are challenging Western church culture like consumerism? And who else would do it with such grace and reckless obedience to the work God is doing in her heart? I'm convinced only my friend Marla would. I love her brave heart, I love that she doesn't think she has all the answers, and I love that she is so kind, forgiving, and apologetic when the iron sharpening iron hurts. I'm thankful she didn't give up hosting this read-along after last weeks explosion of discussion about clothes, 'cause I think this is all good stuff for the Western church to realize that consumerism is a cultural thing, not a God mandated thing. And now I'm stepping on toes...
I was just thinking the other day how cool it is to read a book about the journey God has had you on for years. I didn't realize that God was taking me through some forced fasting, I just thought he was trying to make my head explode! Every chapter so far has resonated in my heart not because Jen Hatmaker is so eloquent (although I love her writing,) and not because I feel really convicted by what is covered, but because this is confirmation that the journey my heart has been on over the last few years is good and right for me. I cried when I read about Jen speaking at a women's conference and all those ladies giving away their possessions, it reminded me of the church in the NT that Paul had to tell them to stop giving 'cause it was too much sacrifice for them. I cried in hope for those women, and in joy that God has brought me to a place where that seems good, not crazy.
When my husband and I married 4.5 years ago we combined two adult lives and households into one house. We moved into our house 6 months later and put everything in one bedroom and said we would unpack 1 box a night until that room was cleared out. 3 years after that almost every box in that room was opened, dug through because we were looking for something, and then thrown back in with more stuff piled in on top. It was floor to ceiling waste, and it just made my heart sad, but I didn't want to tackle it all by myself, and besides not all of that junk was mine. Sometimes I step back and marvel at the childish attitude I have in our marriage, it's all mine unless something has to be done about it and then it's not mine at all.
Then we started talking adoption, and quickly we started talking adoption of a particular girl. I laid awake in bed at night thinking of her sleeping on a mat on the floor while I laid in my comfy bed that I constantly complained about. I looked at labels on things I wanted to buy and often saw the name of the country she lives in. I thought of her beautiful face with sweat pouring down it while she made all of that junk that I didn't even appreciate and just piled in the room of waste. Her delicate hands struggling to get a seam just right on a shirt I wore once and didn't like how it fit so I gave it away. She is in a safe place and not doing hard labor, but many children in her country are not, and now I have a face to put to that ugliness. The daughters and sons of that country are slaves to the daughters and sons of this country, and we all turned a blind eye because we want to keep up with the proverbial Joneses more than we want to care about the quality of life of strangers on the other side of the planet.
So as we prepared our house for imminent arrival (which still has not happened 6+ months later, but at the time we thought it would be within the next few days,) we started to analyze every thing in the room of waste. We dug out every corner of our house, looked it over and decided if what we had was really worth keeping. There was urgency to the purging. We wanted nothing to stay if it would distract in any way from our loving our daughter. About half of our possessions went out the door in a weekend because we wanted our hearts and lives to be uncluttered. We wanted our daughter to walk in our house overwhelmed by love, not stuff.
She still is not home, and it's looking more and more like she will never be. So should we just start re-amassing things to fill the whole in our hearts left by the daughter who never made it home? Should we just readjust back to "normal" and forget all about the dream of loving people more than we love our comfort and happiness? Perish the thought! Even as I pray for God to work miracles to get her home, and pray for my heart to heal if she doesn't come home, I pray that God would not allow us to fall back into "normal" but would continue to conform us from glory to glory. The awareness of this precious life half a world away caused my heart to be aware of millions of precious, marginalized, forgotten lives all around me. Even if she never makes it into my arms, she is part of the legacy God is building in my heart. He is tearing down what I want my kingdom to look like, and is building a glorious messy kingdom of grace that gets all up in the brokenness of lives and sets prisoners free, heals brokenhearted, and cares about the orphan and the widow in their affliction.
I pray that God continues to tear down my waste and mess. I pray that his kingdom would come, his will would be done, on Earth, and in my heart, as it is in Heaven.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Fig leaves or armor?
Chapter 2 of 7 with Marla and friends, and I am conflicted. I preach to my HS girls often about our hearts, that changing our actions isn't nearly as important as our need for God to change our hearts. I feel like Jen Hatmaker gave me a dose of my own medicine this week. So, since I don't know where to start with this, and usually I can just free form ideas into the madness that is this blog, I'm actually going to follow Marla's suggested pattern for the week.
I don't know where I fit as far as my attitude about clothing. My current wardrobe is about 1/4 of what I used to have. But there are a lot of days that I feel discontent because I have the same 100+ items to choose from. I have had days where I smell something all day and then realize it's the pair of jeans I've been wearing for so many days that I can't remember the last time I washed them. Every time I sit down with a new knitting project my husband asks if I'm making myself ANOTHER scarf. I have walked away from a $2 t-shirt in the Target sale rack because I can't justify the purchase, but have splurged on a $20 (it's on sale how can I pass up that deal?) purse because I'm just tired of the one I have. I would love to say that I don't care about clothes, but every time my fashionable mom is clearing out her closet I get excited to go "shopping" for new things. I'm so contradictory it's embarrassing. I know I would have a hard time limiting myself to only 7 items of clothing because I would be worried that people would notice my repeat outfits, but if I'm being realistic I think I wear about 10 items of clothing on a regular rotation with very few substitutions. The problem though is that none of this matters. I could have half as many clothing items as I do now and still have a heart that is too focused on outward appearance. I could have twice what I have now and love my neighbor better.
I NEED spiritual clothes more than physical trappings. I need a belt of truth wrapped around me, and a breastplate of righteousness protecting my heart. I need shoes for my feet that make me ready to charge forward preaching the gospel of peace. I need faith that covers me like a shield and protects me from fiery darts of comparison, greed, envy, strife. I need the knowledge of my salvation to protect my mind from doubt. I need the double edged sword of the Word of God to pierce through to the thoughts and intentions of my heart. I need prayer to cover me like a cloak.
This is what I need, but often I feel like Adam and Eve sewing together fig leaves to hide myself from God and others.
In a culture that elevates beauty and style, the Christian community is at genuine risk for distraction, even deception. - p 67I struggle with this often. I come from a church tradition of always wearing Sunday best. I wore a dress to church every day of my childhood. It was the one day a week when my mom would curl my hair, she would even paint her nails for Sunday morning. I now go to a church where jeans, shorts, flip-flops, whatever, is the standard. It's almost as odd (culturally contrary) in my current church to wear a dress on Sunday as it would have been for me to wear shorts to church when I was a kid. Usually though I wear my "nice" clothes because if I didn't wear them to church I would have no need to even have anything other than jeans and t-shirts in my wardrobe. Here's my real struggle though: for a church that in it's actions says that particular clothing is not necessary for worship, I've had more conversations on a Sunday morning about clothes (hair, make-up, etc.) than about real heart issues. I have had more people ask me if I made the scarf I'm wearing that day than people asking how my heart is doing with our adoption process, or lack thereof. But before I start feeling all high and mighty, I know I'm the same way. I will comment on a million things I like about your outfit before I ask how I can pray for you this week. Some Sundays I get so concerned about what I will wear that day, and how out of control my hair is, that I end up fighting with my husband about nothing and not even taking a breath until I sit down in my seat at church. Most of the week I have no clue what I'm wearing, but somehow my heart is programed to care on Sundays in an unhealthy and unnatural way. What are Sundays for? Am I there for corporate worship, teaching, fellowship, and love or am I there to make a good impression, to make people think I'm all put together, to be noticed?
I don't know where I fit as far as my attitude about clothing. My current wardrobe is about 1/4 of what I used to have. But there are a lot of days that I feel discontent because I have the same 100+ items to choose from. I have had days where I smell something all day and then realize it's the pair of jeans I've been wearing for so many days that I can't remember the last time I washed them. Every time I sit down with a new knitting project my husband asks if I'm making myself ANOTHER scarf. I have walked away from a $2 t-shirt in the Target sale rack because I can't justify the purchase, but have splurged on a $20 (it's on sale how can I pass up that deal?) purse because I'm just tired of the one I have. I would love to say that I don't care about clothes, but every time my fashionable mom is clearing out her closet I get excited to go "shopping" for new things. I'm so contradictory it's embarrassing. I know I would have a hard time limiting myself to only 7 items of clothing because I would be worried that people would notice my repeat outfits, but if I'm being realistic I think I wear about 10 items of clothing on a regular rotation with very few substitutions. The problem though is that none of this matters. I could have half as many clothing items as I do now and still have a heart that is too focused on outward appearance. I could have twice what I have now and love my neighbor better.
I NEED spiritual clothes more than physical trappings. I need a belt of truth wrapped around me, and a breastplate of righteousness protecting my heart. I need shoes for my feet that make me ready to charge forward preaching the gospel of peace. I need faith that covers me like a shield and protects me from fiery darts of comparison, greed, envy, strife. I need the knowledge of my salvation to protect my mind from doubt. I need the double edged sword of the Word of God to pierce through to the thoughts and intentions of my heart. I need prayer to cover me like a cloak.
This is what I need, but often I feel like Adam and Eve sewing together fig leaves to hide myself from God and others.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Beans, Rice, and Perspective
Here I am with Marla for the first week of the 7 read along. FOOD. This chapter felt so familiar to me. God has taken me through my own food journey for the last year and half, and I could so relate with what Jen Hatmaker had to say (both the "I can't take it anymore" and the "wow God.")
My body has always been weird. I have a multitude of reminders that I have a broken body because of a broken world, but the one that could have explained a vast majority of those issues is that I have extreme food allergies. Unfortunately, 30 years ago no one was testing babies, toddlers, young children for food allergies, unless they had an obvious reaction. My momma always fed us pretty healthy food, very little packaged stuff, minimal ingredients, low sugar and fat content. All the stuff we are supposed to have. I was allergic to most of it and had no clue. I felt nauseated after eating at almost every meal for as long as I can remember. I have major sugar spikes and drops that seem to be random. I had behavioral issues, concentration issues, and constantly was alternating between ok and sick. These were all seemingly unrelated, but new research shows that many of them can be connected to constantly being exposed to foods you are allergic to. Rather than having one major reaction I was having hundreds of little ones that were piling up.
A year and a half ago I finally ended up at an allergist's office as a last resort. They did the prick test for quite a few things (75+) and I experienced my first taste of anaphylaxis. My husband had to be called at work to come take me home 2 hours later once they felt my blood pressure had normalized. I walked into the allergist's office knowing 1 food I was allergic to. I walked out with a list of 10 things to eliminate from my diet immediately. I didn't even know what to eat for dinner that night. My entire world turned upside down. How had I made it this far in my life without any awareness that I was slowly killing myself?
I was confronted with my own mortality months before my 30th birthday, and it took me weeks to get over the shock of it. I was in a very miry pit of despair, and had only salad and chicken to comfort my broken heart. Every new thing I tried to make came out as a disaster at least once. My husband is still convinced that a particular brand of rice noodles is actual rice glued together in noodle shapes and if you cook it too long the glue melts and you end up with a hearty ground turkey sauce over rice rather than spaghetti. I didn't have snack food anymore. Shopping took me at least twice as long because I had to read every ingredient on the package. More than once I walked out of the grocery store crying, abandoning my cart half full of awful tasting food on an aisle, because I just couldn't take the constant reminders of what I couldn't have. The final straw was when I went down the anaphylaxis road again after partaking in Lord's Supper. This is a commanded grace that I can no longer have, surely God had to have planned for this way back when Jesus broke the bread!
I got tired of people trying to relate to me by telling me how hard it is to find quality organic fruit. I was hurt more than once by someone who argued that allergies were all in my head and I just needed to rise above. I felt so alone when with friends or family because every meal revolved around people asking me what I couldn't have at the meal, and then telling me how good that banned substance was. I lost 40 pounds in 6 months, mostly because I was not even coming close to meeting basic dietary needs on a daily basis. People would invite us to dinner, I would tell them about my food restrictions and suddenly they would forget to call to schedule dinner. I tried to send recipes to friends and family, post successful meals to Facebook, bring things to potlucks with every ingredient written down, make bread for the entire church so that I could participate in Lord's Supper. Since I tend to live life full force that's what I did with this new-found issue. I was on my own personal crusade to educate everyone I knew about food allergies and tell them how to treat people with food allergies better.
But God had bigger plans than me making sure that everyone knew I was dying on my cross of food allergies. I started to realize how wasteful I was being with the abundance of food I was turning my nose up at because it wasn't what I was used to. Rather than complain that I had to eat yet another rice and bean meal, God made me aware of the millions of lives that would treasure beans to add to their rice, if they even had rice. I saw absolute joy in the eyes of a couple people I gave grocery bags full of food that I had to take out of my pantry. People I love who were struggling to put food on their tables and I didn't even know it until I gave them a bag of noodles. A friend confided in me that she was so thankful for bread that I gave her; her dinner the night before had been a scoop of peanut butter and a scoop of jelly out of the jar because she couldn't afford bread and that's all she had left in the house. People I hugged at church and told them I loved them were going hungry. While I complained about another batch of brownies that tasted awful, I forgot to invite people to dinner. People who would have been happy with any disaster meal I made were being neglected because I was too busy talking to listen. I realized that there are people in my city who have to eat food they are allergic to because that's the only kind of food they have at the local food bank. Starving people all around me and all I could think about was how hungry I was!
And in my hunger God gave me Romans 8. This has been the anthem of my heart for almost 2 years. I am not condemned because I am set free IN Christ. If I live according to what my flesh wants I die, but if I live according to what the Spirit wants for me I live. I am an adopted child of God, and part of my inheritance in the Kingdom is suffering. But I'm not alone in my suffering, Christ suffered, and all of creation groans for final redemption! The Spirit knows what is in my heart and intercedes for me when I am without words to go on. All of these things are being used to conform me into the image of Christ. I was chosen specifically for this life. But in everything I am sure of one thing, NOTHING can separate me from the love of God.
Not even food allergies.
I have truly experienced hunger, and it makes my heart ache for others. Lord thank you for beans and rice... and perspective.
My body has always been weird. I have a multitude of reminders that I have a broken body because of a broken world, but the one that could have explained a vast majority of those issues is that I have extreme food allergies. Unfortunately, 30 years ago no one was testing babies, toddlers, young children for food allergies, unless they had an obvious reaction. My momma always fed us pretty healthy food, very little packaged stuff, minimal ingredients, low sugar and fat content. All the stuff we are supposed to have. I was allergic to most of it and had no clue. I felt nauseated after eating at almost every meal for as long as I can remember. I have major sugar spikes and drops that seem to be random. I had behavioral issues, concentration issues, and constantly was alternating between ok and sick. These were all seemingly unrelated, but new research shows that many of them can be connected to constantly being exposed to foods you are allergic to. Rather than having one major reaction I was having hundreds of little ones that were piling up.
A year and a half ago I finally ended up at an allergist's office as a last resort. They did the prick test for quite a few things (75+) and I experienced my first taste of anaphylaxis. My husband had to be called at work to come take me home 2 hours later once they felt my blood pressure had normalized. I walked into the allergist's office knowing 1 food I was allergic to. I walked out with a list of 10 things to eliminate from my diet immediately. I didn't even know what to eat for dinner that night. My entire world turned upside down. How had I made it this far in my life without any awareness that I was slowly killing myself?
I was confronted with my own mortality months before my 30th birthday, and it took me weeks to get over the shock of it. I was in a very miry pit of despair, and had only salad and chicken to comfort my broken heart. Every new thing I tried to make came out as a disaster at least once. My husband is still convinced that a particular brand of rice noodles is actual rice glued together in noodle shapes and if you cook it too long the glue melts and you end up with a hearty ground turkey sauce over rice rather than spaghetti. I didn't have snack food anymore. Shopping took me at least twice as long because I had to read every ingredient on the package. More than once I walked out of the grocery store crying, abandoning my cart half full of awful tasting food on an aisle, because I just couldn't take the constant reminders of what I couldn't have. The final straw was when I went down the anaphylaxis road again after partaking in Lord's Supper. This is a commanded grace that I can no longer have, surely God had to have planned for this way back when Jesus broke the bread!
I got tired of people trying to relate to me by telling me how hard it is to find quality organic fruit. I was hurt more than once by someone who argued that allergies were all in my head and I just needed to rise above. I felt so alone when with friends or family because every meal revolved around people asking me what I couldn't have at the meal, and then telling me how good that banned substance was. I lost 40 pounds in 6 months, mostly because I was not even coming close to meeting basic dietary needs on a daily basis. People would invite us to dinner, I would tell them about my food restrictions and suddenly they would forget to call to schedule dinner. I tried to send recipes to friends and family, post successful meals to Facebook, bring things to potlucks with every ingredient written down, make bread for the entire church so that I could participate in Lord's Supper. Since I tend to live life full force that's what I did with this new-found issue. I was on my own personal crusade to educate everyone I knew about food allergies and tell them how to treat people with food allergies better.
But God had bigger plans than me making sure that everyone knew I was dying on my cross of food allergies. I started to realize how wasteful I was being with the abundance of food I was turning my nose up at because it wasn't what I was used to. Rather than complain that I had to eat yet another rice and bean meal, God made me aware of the millions of lives that would treasure beans to add to their rice, if they even had rice. I saw absolute joy in the eyes of a couple people I gave grocery bags full of food that I had to take out of my pantry. People I love who were struggling to put food on their tables and I didn't even know it until I gave them a bag of noodles. A friend confided in me that she was so thankful for bread that I gave her; her dinner the night before had been a scoop of peanut butter and a scoop of jelly out of the jar because she couldn't afford bread and that's all she had left in the house. People I hugged at church and told them I loved them were going hungry. While I complained about another batch of brownies that tasted awful, I forgot to invite people to dinner. People who would have been happy with any disaster meal I made were being neglected because I was too busy talking to listen. I realized that there are people in my city who have to eat food they are allergic to because that's the only kind of food they have at the local food bank. Starving people all around me and all I could think about was how hungry I was!
And in my hunger God gave me Romans 8. This has been the anthem of my heart for almost 2 years. I am not condemned because I am set free IN Christ. If I live according to what my flesh wants I die, but if I live according to what the Spirit wants for me I live. I am an adopted child of God, and part of my inheritance in the Kingdom is suffering. But I'm not alone in my suffering, Christ suffered, and all of creation groans for final redemption! The Spirit knows what is in my heart and intercedes for me when I am without words to go on. All of these things are being used to conform me into the image of Christ. I was chosen specifically for this life. But in everything I am sure of one thing, NOTHING can separate me from the love of God.
Not even food allergies.
I have truly experienced hunger, and it makes my heart ache for others. Lord thank you for beans and rice... and perspective.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Mercy hiding in plain sight
Starting in on another read along with Marla, my heart is in a bad place. The book is 7 by Jen Hatmaker, and judging by the intro I think I will be exceptionally challenged by this book. It's not that I think I have an issue with excess in many areas of my life per se, more that I know my heart is wicked and twisted and even my non-excess is excess wrapped in self-righteousness. Romans 7:24 seems to be my refrain lately.
Marla invited us to do several things in this first week, and while I would feel more comfortable doing anything else, I think sharing my "right now" story is really what's best. Since my heart is in a bad place I think it best to just bear it out so that I can hopefully be more willing for God to work through this read along.
I doubt the mercy of God. My heart breaks to even admit that. I know that God is good, faithful, wise, holy, righteous, powerful. I preach God's mercy to our students at church, but in my heart, in my life, I fail to see it. I have come to a point of feeling like all God does is strip me down, he leaves nothing stable, nothing secure, nothing good. I've even started fearing that he will strike my husband dead because he isn't merciful enough to let me have that one good thing.
All of this is blasphemy. O Lord of glory, forgive my wretchedness, save me from myself.
The Lord gives AND the Lord takes away, I will bless his name.
I don't know why God put in my heart an overwhelming desire for children. I have no children. Even as I think that my students are stand in children, and love them passionately, I know they are not mine. The daughter I know is mine may never come home, in fact my heart is pretty sure of that fact. I sat with several moms of our students on Sunday while they chatted about life. One came to join the group and started asking questions about schools, going around the circle to let every mom have a chance to say the schooling choices for her kids. When she got to me she said something flippant which I know was just to move on to the next person, but it cut deep into my heart. In that moment I knew I was not part of the group, and I wondered if I ever would be.
I have two kinds of friends, the ones who are my age or older and have multiple children, and the ones who have no kids but are so much younger than me that I feel like I'm mentoring them. Both groups are far too busy to spend much time on friendship, and I am left in a no man's land of loneliness. Most days it's just easier to stay home, or go out and interact with strangers as I run my errands, than to reach out to the people God has placed in my life. I'm tired of pursuing friendships that no one has time for. I'm tired of trying to find commonalities with people who know they have very little in common with me. I'm tired of being lonely.
Then God gives me days where this is on repeat in my head all day long:
Let every man be considered a liar
If he doubts the goodness and faithfulness of God- Josh Garrels
And it hits me smack between the eyes: I have spent so long wallowing in self-pity, self-gratification, self-justification, self-(everything else) that I have begun to believe lies about God. There is so much more that God needs to strip away from me, the fact that he hasn't is evidence of his mercy.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Marla invited us to do several things in this first week, and while I would feel more comfortable doing anything else, I think sharing my "right now" story is really what's best. Since my heart is in a bad place I think it best to just bear it out so that I can hopefully be more willing for God to work through this read along.
I doubt the mercy of God. My heart breaks to even admit that. I know that God is good, faithful, wise, holy, righteous, powerful. I preach God's mercy to our students at church, but in my heart, in my life, I fail to see it. I have come to a point of feeling like all God does is strip me down, he leaves nothing stable, nothing secure, nothing good. I've even started fearing that he will strike my husband dead because he isn't merciful enough to let me have that one good thing.
All of this is blasphemy. O Lord of glory, forgive my wretchedness, save me from myself.
The Lord gives AND the Lord takes away, I will bless his name.
I don't know why God put in my heart an overwhelming desire for children. I have no children. Even as I think that my students are stand in children, and love them passionately, I know they are not mine. The daughter I know is mine may never come home, in fact my heart is pretty sure of that fact. I sat with several moms of our students on Sunday while they chatted about life. One came to join the group and started asking questions about schools, going around the circle to let every mom have a chance to say the schooling choices for her kids. When she got to me she said something flippant which I know was just to move on to the next person, but it cut deep into my heart. In that moment I knew I was not part of the group, and I wondered if I ever would be.
I have two kinds of friends, the ones who are my age or older and have multiple children, and the ones who have no kids but are so much younger than me that I feel like I'm mentoring them. Both groups are far too busy to spend much time on friendship, and I am left in a no man's land of loneliness. Most days it's just easier to stay home, or go out and interact with strangers as I run my errands, than to reach out to the people God has placed in my life. I'm tired of pursuing friendships that no one has time for. I'm tired of trying to find commonalities with people who know they have very little in common with me. I'm tired of being lonely.
Then God gives me days where this is on repeat in my head all day long:
Let every man be considered a liar
If he doubts the goodness and faithfulness of God- Josh Garrels
And it hits me smack between the eyes: I have spent so long wallowing in self-pity, self-gratification, self-justification, self-(everything else) that I have begun to believe lies about God. There is so much more that God needs to strip away from me, the fact that he hasn't is evidence of his mercy.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
13
Yesterday you turned 13. I made you cupcakes. And I cried, A LOT.
I thought of the 13 years you have lived. I thought of the many losses you have felt. I thought of all the times you have been betrayed, abandoned, used. I thought of the fact that I don't even know the tip of the iceberg of any of these things in your life. I tried to pray for you, but there weren't even words to ask God for blessing for you. I wanted to say so many things that I couldn't say any. I don't know if you were even aware it was your birthday, and I almost hope that you weren't. I hope in my heart that you are happy, at peace. I try to pray for confidence for you, that you will join our family soon, but I'm not even sure I have this same confidence. I pray and hope and dream of what it will be like when we are together, and at the same time cry at the thought of losing you before you're ever mine.
You are mine. You will always be mine. You are a huge piece of my heart, have been since the moment we said yes. I walk in your room and expect to see you. I look at the space next to me on the couch and know that that's where you belong. As we head into winter I have added blankets to your bed, I don't want you to be cold if you come home tomorrow and I forget you need more blankets. I hug girls your age at church and know that it's nothing compared to the hug of my daughter. My daughter. My smart, compassionate, sarcastic, beautiful daughter. You are mine. I couldn't stop loving you if I tried. I have in fact tried to pretend that I don't love you, but it doesn't work. To stop loving you would be like going blind. It would be the end of life as I know it. I know that I would go on, but every breath would ache. My heart is broken by the thought of you. No one just walks away from this kind of break, it will leave a mark for the rest of my life.
So, the only option in my heart is to hope against hope that you are coming home. I put all of my eggs in this basket, and I just have to trust that it was a good idea. I know that God works all things to the good of conforming his children to the image of Christ. I know that nothing is impossible with God. I know. I KNOW. Even though all the unknown is overwhelming, I cling to what I know. I know that I love you. I know that God is good. I know that God is in control. I know that you are mine.
I thought of the 13 years you have lived. I thought of the many losses you have felt. I thought of all the times you have been betrayed, abandoned, used. I thought of the fact that I don't even know the tip of the iceberg of any of these things in your life. I tried to pray for you, but there weren't even words to ask God for blessing for you. I wanted to say so many things that I couldn't say any. I don't know if you were even aware it was your birthday, and I almost hope that you weren't. I hope in my heart that you are happy, at peace. I try to pray for confidence for you, that you will join our family soon, but I'm not even sure I have this same confidence. I pray and hope and dream of what it will be like when we are together, and at the same time cry at the thought of losing you before you're ever mine.
You are mine. You will always be mine. You are a huge piece of my heart, have been since the moment we said yes. I walk in your room and expect to see you. I look at the space next to me on the couch and know that that's where you belong. As we head into winter I have added blankets to your bed, I don't want you to be cold if you come home tomorrow and I forget you need more blankets. I hug girls your age at church and know that it's nothing compared to the hug of my daughter. My daughter. My smart, compassionate, sarcastic, beautiful daughter. You are mine. I couldn't stop loving you if I tried. I have in fact tried to pretend that I don't love you, but it doesn't work. To stop loving you would be like going blind. It would be the end of life as I know it. I know that I would go on, but every breath would ache. My heart is broken by the thought of you. No one just walks away from this kind of break, it will leave a mark for the rest of my life.
So, the only option in my heart is to hope against hope that you are coming home. I put all of my eggs in this basket, and I just have to trust that it was a good idea. I know that God works all things to the good of conforming his children to the image of Christ. I know that nothing is impossible with God. I know. I KNOW. Even though all the unknown is overwhelming, I cling to what I know. I know that I love you. I know that God is good. I know that God is in control. I know that you are mine.
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