It happened.
I fell in love with Him all over again.
I spent last weekend at the Created for Care retreat, studying the outline of His face with over 500 women whose heart beats for the orphan. He met us there and His beauty was breathtaking. In that room, there were over 650 former orphans represented, home with their forever families.
working mama
is really hard. Being a mama to a child that comes from hard places is very hard. Please hear me, it’s so beautiful and worth every second, but it’s hard. And after a while it can take a toll on your heart.
Brandon always makes fun of me because I have so many best friends. And I do. Really. I’ll admit it. I have a good handful or two 🙂 of really BEST friends. And I love them so much. They have walked really dark roads with me and have finally seen our dark turn to morning. But most of them have babies that grew in their tummy. Their children look like them, they have their personality traits, and they know their medical history. They have stretch marks on their bellies and I have scars on my heart. And we are all mamas, so we talk about mama things, but as hard as they try, they can’t understand parts of my story, because it isn’t theirs.
There’s a peace and relief in knowing you’re understood, isn’t there? I was thinking about all the mamas I was about to meet as I was throwing things into Selah’s overnight bag (I had to borrow it). I got a glimpse of my brown baby girl handing me her toy so I could tell her thank you for the 100th time that day, and I cried thinking about all we have gone through to bring her into our family. All the years of
, the nights crying in an empty nursery, the hundreds of necklaces I stamped to bring her home, and all the years I spent trying to understand a Sovereign God. When I finally made it to the retreat, with all these women who understood me and our journey, I lost it. I cried most of the weekend.
Just a warning…what I am about to share is real and raw. It isn’t wrapped up nicely in a perfect box with a beautiful bow. It’s heavy and hard to swallow, but keep reading. There is a good ending. With Jesus, there is always a good ending.
Adoption is beautiful. It’s a physical display of the Gospel. Adoption is a story of redemption and hope. Grace is intertwined between every word of each adoption story. But in order for there to be beauty, redemption and grace, there must be a mess. In a world before The Fall, there wouldn’t be a need for adoption. God didn’t intend for His people to be His enemies. It is because of our sin and our brokenness that we need to be redeemed.
Adoption is loss for all parties. Loss, in our case, of natural children. Not having children that look like us or feeling a baby kick in my belly. Loss for a birth mom. Loss of the chance to give baths, put on band aids, and see those first steps. And loss of a birth family for the adoptee. Loss of knowing family heritage, and answers to many questions.
I went to the retreat with eight women from our Orphan Care ministry (
) at our church. All of these women also have adopted children or are in the adoption process. Some of them are in my two handfuls of best friends, but then others I really got to know on this trip. After a full day of learning how to parent our heartgrown babies, love and serve our birthmoms, and gazing on the beauty of a Father to us all, we sat down in one of our rooms on the bed. We were all emotionally drained and were making jokes (really funny ones!) to ease the mood. One of the women started crying and said, “It is so terrible that the only way for me to have children is for another mother to loose hers.”
It’s such a weird feeling, this adoption thing. On one side, there is complete joy and rejoicing for new life, and on the other side, there is grieving of life lost. It’s hard and messy and absolutely beautiful. And then I look at our story. I couldn’t dream of a more perfect adoption story for Selah. I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect relationship with our
. I never pictured God would write such beauty is the midst of our mess.
So, adoption is beautiful, it is messy, but it is FULL of grace, hope, and redemption. And after all the heaviness, we get to land here. In the grace part.
The very first night,
, invited us to a weekend of “Kol d’mama de Kah.” This Hebrew saying is the same meaning of the sounds a new mama whispers to her new baby. She doesn’t really have words to say, it’s mostly weeping, but it’s staring intimately into the face of a love, words can’t describe. It can also be described as the intimate whispers of a husband and wife, face to face.
This past weekend I grieved, rejoiced, and postured myself for Kol d’mama de Kah with the Lord. I brought back some really practical tools to serve my baby better. I met so many mamas with stories like mine. I heard about all God is doing around the ENTIRE world to “set the lonely in families.” And it was beautiful.
