The last weeks of an adoption, right before you travel...excruciating! There is so much going on inside my heart and brain and body right now that it is really hard to articulate. Those who have been where I am will know what I am talking about, I think. (Unless I am truly some sort of weirdo.)
Last week we sent out a letter (via Facebook), to practically everyone we know, detailing a little of our adoption story. I have read that letter a bunch of times, and re-read my own accounting of our story in my March blog post and every time I read it I am so amazed! When I look back at the whole of my life, I don't understand how I get to have this life! God's grace is so incredibly amazing! I could not, did not, would not have planned this life for myself. As a matter of fact, I tried my best to make sure it would never look anything like this. I ran from God for a long time. I wounded and alienated many people in the process. But God pursued me unrelentingly! Eventually I could no longer resist a love that knew me, all of me, and still pursued me. I did not feel at all worthy but wanted a true love so desperately that I accepted the love and forgiveness He offered. I had nothing to offer Him in return except myself.
It is with this same kind of love we pursue our children. With a fraction of the intensity, I am sure. But if what I feel is a fraction of the way God feels about me,...there are no words.
In the letter we sent out, at the very end my husband said something along the lines of "thanks for your interest in our family and our mission". By the way, our family IS our mission. This week, I read a post from a friend (also an adoptive mother) who has been accused of being "some sort of missionary" bringing children to America to rescue them. My heart hurts for her and for those who don't understand that that is not our "mission". Our mission is to bear/adopt children and love them like God has loved us. That is it. How we come to have the children we have is a mystery to me, but not to God...never a mystery to God. When we talk to Eden about how we found her, she always wants me to tell her over and over about how God told us she was in China and to go find her, and how we searched and searched and it took a long, long time for us to find her. And she inserts at this part of the story that she was "at the playground" (orphanage) looking and looking for us but she couldn't find us and she was so sad and scared. But we didn't stop, we kept looking until we "found" her. We will tell our boys a similar story. We started looking for them in Peru (weird, I know, because they are Chinese). We will not tell them that we were on a rescue mission, or a disciple-making mission. We will tell them we were on a mission of love. God told us to find them and bring them home and love them and we did not stop until we did just that.
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