If Only the Throne Room
What they saw as injustice, God saw as mercy.
Immediately Sam’s thinning face and big toothy smile flashed across my mind. I suddenly felt the full weight of the injustice I had carried for so long – the whole injustice of this wait, with the pandemic and the spy balloons and the orphanage running out of food. I suddenly felt the weight of my belief – or was it resentment? – that I knew God could fix it and He hadn’t. He could intervene, but He hadn’t. He could bring my boy home, but He hadn’t. It just felt so wrong and unfair.
But maybe, just maybe, if what Dr. M said was true, then maybe what I was seeing as injustice, God was intending for mercy.
Not Here Says the Ocean
What if we heard God right and chose not to heed His voice?
What if God wants to bring healing to our family through Sam? What if he wants to bring healing just like he did through Gideon, even when we couldn't see it?
What if when Jesus talked about going to the blind and the lame and the disabled, what if when He talked about going to the people the world overlooks, what if He meant that literally?
What if He literally meant we’d have to lose our life to find it?
We Have a Little Surprise...
We have a little surprise…WE’RE ADOPTING AGAIN!
Four years ago, in early 2017, Brian and I saw a photo of a little boy we couldn’t forget. He was with a foster care organization in China we had recently connected with, so we began seeing updates about him every few months. And every time we saw him, we prayed again that a family would come. Though we didn’t know it yet on that day in early 2017, we were just a few weeks away from seeing our Giddy’s face for the very first time. We would travel to Korea, bring our son home, and be absolutely smitten by our little boy’s big joy as we learned to be a family! And another few years would pass, years spent praying every chance we got that God would raise up a family for this other little boy we couldn’t forget.
Books for You and Your Littles
Over the years – and especially in light of recent events – I have received lots of messages and questions about what books and resources Brian and I recommend in the adoption world. At the same time – and also especially in light of recent events – we have worked hard to grow our library of books for Gideon to include characters of different cultures, skin colors, and abilities. It is important to us that he grows up seeing a world that is beautiful, not just in spite of our differences, but because of them.
Families Like Yours
And so long as our world is full of kids who need someone to love them, we need all kinds of families willing to say YES. We need all kinds of families willing to fight for these kids and their families, willing to love them even if loving them means laying down our own demands and desires and dreams of what our family could or should look like. We need families willing – whether for a season or a lifetime – to step into the messy, broken, ugly parts of our world because right in the middle is a kid who is worth it. Right in the middle is a beautiful, precious, amazing kid who will likely change our lives a whole heck of a lot more than we will change theirs.
We need families willing to see the world like Christ does. And Christ sees all of our kids like he sees each of us – wanted, loved, and cherished. American, Korean, South African, Columbian, white, brown, black, those with birth parents and those without, those with special needs and those without…all of them.
We need all kinds of families. We need families like yours and families like mine.
Love Orphans on Giving Tuesday
Today is Giving Tuesday! Not many of you know this, but one of our FAVORITE days all month is the day we decide where our “leftover tithe” is going to go. See, we have a certain percentage of our income we give to the church and “regular” giving to specific organizations, but there is a little money left over each month that gets earmarked for just our special date, where we’ll go to a coffee shop together and talk about how we want to give the “extra” that month.