"Forever the Hope of my Heart"

So, have you ever found a song that captures what your heart wants to say so well that you feel like you literally want to eat it?  Well, this one has been constant the past two days.  As we wait in life and try to not put hope in man - we want our hope, our future, our joy, our EVERYTHING to be in Him.  Excuse me while I go back to singing this super loud because all my co-workers have gone home and the rainy campus is GREAT for singing! ;)

Why live life from dream to dream ...

I used to dream so big.  My brother and I used to look through the JC Penny catalog (yes the real paper and glue catalog not online!!) and we would pick out what we wanted our lives to look like.  We would pick our future spouse, our kids, the rooms in the house, the color of the walls ... down to every detail.  My favorite was planning the nursery.  I would usually choose to have twins or triplets and would pick matching yet different colors for their bedding etc.  So .. as I typed that I cringed, because it sounds so dumb in retrospect.  And so vain.  But on some level it was also full of hope - hope that our lives would be full of all the biggest and best blessings our childish minds could contain.

Fast forward several years and my dreams started being shattered one by one.  Almost exactly 6 months after we were married I stood broken and in shame as I whispered to my best friend and husband: "I don't know how to dream anymore."

When you are trying to adopt something weird happens (or is with me at least), you want to dream ... I mean you kind of have to dream to begin the process, but at the same time you are terrified of dreaming.  Especially as has been in our case when you have lost babies you thought God was giving to you.  As soon as you begin to dream it shatters, and you almost feel like even breathing a hopeful breath will break the magic of the dream and wake you up.

God has been showing me gently all my life I guess, but more lately, that HE is good even if our circumstances are not.  And that being grateful for even the hard bits of life is what really knowing Him is all about.

Last night I thought; "I shouldn't let my heart have even the tiniest glimmer of hope" ...(after all only a couple of weeks ago an international situation we were decided to pursue was taken from us because of international adoption law changing and countries becoming harder to adopt from) but I also realized that maybe I would rather have the sigh of relief that dreaming brings even if the dream ends the way they always do.  It's torture loving children you have never met, knowing you may never.  But at the same time, how can I stop hoping?  And how can I hope, when I know that if I ever am given my dream, someone else will be making an impossible decision?  I feel like my hope for adoption means that I hope something very hard happens with someone else, and that makes me feel horrible!  So, last night I let myself dream.  And today I regret it, because I'm afraid of how it will feel when I wake up.  But, I just keep trying to remind myself that I will be grateful and choose joy even when I have to wake up ... This is just the reality of where my heart is right now.

So for now, every love song I hear is my heart crying out to our babies ... One Day I've Fly Away
A Thousand Years   say something

Cursed to be a Blessing

I haven't blogged in a while - I have been very busy with my new job teaching at a Christian High school!  But something has been on my mind and heart for a long time in regards to adoption stuff and I haven't been able to sort it out until just this week.

Someone said something yesterday about how a young couple is being so blessed as they are pregnant with their first baby - and basically that God is blessing them by allowing them to be part of creating an eternal being.  Which is AWESOME - I mean, pregnancy is miraculous in every way and I will always be overwhelmed with worship of a God who can make a baby this way!

When I read the Old Testament in particular there are so many stories of infertility - and the people involved usually refer to themselves as being "cursed" with the inability to bear children.  I'm guessing that most of us who can't have children feel "cursed".  Now, I know that in Biblical times much more pressure was put on women to be able to produce children - and we live in a different culture today .. but there is still a very strong feeling of being cursed.  The Bible also has many stories where God opened a woman's womb especially after her seeking Him, or some special grace given.  Even though I don't really believe I am cursed - it feels like it.  Because of all this, and because of the general feeling of shame involved in infertility, I have often wondered why God won't gave me a miracle and let me have children.  I don't doubt His love, but I feel "less than" all the time. (which is ok - because in my "less than" He is my adequacy)

But this week I realized something.  I consider the ability to bear children to be a great blessing, and I will probably always feel a bit cursed in my inability.  But this week I started thinking about the blessing of having loving parents (a blessing I have been blessed with).  There are children in this world that would give anything to have the blessing of parents who love them, the blessing of coming home to a safe place, to never be abused, to have a warm bed and lots of hugs, to have a daddy to tell them they are beautiful, to have a mama put band-aids on ouchies, to have unconditional love and acceptance and safety.  My heart aches for children who don't have those blessings.  And I suddenly knew and accepted that I'm ok with being "cursed" so that some of these kids can have the blessings they are longing  for in this life.

We started filling out paperwork for our home study this week.  It will be a long process - but we're trying to take steps in the right direction.