Category Archives: post adoption

I don’t know: confronting confusion with equanimity (and satire)

Posted on by February 1, 2024

Our seventh attempt to get through to a hotline. You are number 120 in queue, your wait time is 45 minutes.

Thirty minutes later: You are number 97 in queue, your wait time is one hour and twenty-eight minutes. Wait, what?

Almost two hours later: A noise that sounds like someone picking up the phone to answer. And maybe they did, but we’ll never know, because the call was disconnected.

[OH EXPLETIVE]

I don't know: confronting confusion with equanimity (and satire)

Have I complained about government paperwork enough already? Too bad, here we go.

If you’ve never heard of it before, let me introduce you to the concept of the “Circumlocution Office.” You’ve probably experienced it many times, just not by that name.

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

The Circumlocution Office is where All Things Bureaucracy and Paperwork go to die. But they don’t just die – they relocate, then circumvent, then redirect, then dawdle sluggishly toward some oozey pit of phone lines, paper-stuffed cabinets, and stale TicTacs in a room like a giant coffin with apathetic lighting until all papers within have disintegrated from the erosion of procrastination.

Thanks to the guardianship process for two of our kids, we are in the middle of applying for multiple programs for both of them. (This is required, not optional, don’t even get me started.) I’ve mentioned before that paperwork and administrative duties are my hate language – as opposed to actual love languages like coffee, memes, and good sushi – and the process of navigating this system has challenged all my efforts toward healthy self-medicating, including prayer, staying up too late reading, and a slightly addictive obsession with Sudoku.

If you’re not familiar with Sudoku, the instructions are precise: Every row, column, and square must have only one of each number (or in our case, color). Even at the higher levels, it’s hard but not confusing. When you feel stuck there’s always a solution if you consider it long enough. The rules are simple and they don’t change.

In spite of being in the guardianship process for over a year, we have yet to find a single corner of this arena where experts agree on how the process is completed, and none of it has been streamlined for ease and efficiency.

It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Enter Paperwork Saga, round two: Day of Phone Calls.

Paperwork requires phone calls because applications and government websites are designed by mystical regulatory leprechauns in such a way as to give you only a third of the information you need to fill them out. The rest is a riddle of precision guesswork spiked with threats of legal retribution if you forget to cross a T or you accidentally double dot an I.

It turns out though, there are some wonderful people whom you can call. Most of them admit the system is a mess, and none of them actually work for the government.

Unfortunately, none of them know the same things. For example, I have asked approximately fourteen people if we could apply for a particular requirement for our kids before they turned eighteen, and every answer without fail has been “I don’t know” until one person finally said, “Oh, absolutely. In fact, it takes about a year for it to go through. So you should’ve applied a year ago.”

*headdesk, headdesk*

But here’s what I’m learning: Most of the things we dread are not as bad or hard as they seem. And when they are, you get writing material out of it. (Also, the extraneous forms and duplicate paperwork can usually be composted as bedding in the chicken coop.)

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen…Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving — HOW NOT TO DO IT.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

One government website says “You can try applying online.” (Try? Try? Like it’s one of those ball-throwing games at the State Fair?) The instructions continue with this disclaimer: “Depending on your situation, it may be hard or it may be easy.” Um. Greeeat. Turns out, if the website craps out in the first thirty seconds every time you try filling out the forms, it’s definitely hard.

Two people told me, “Call this office. They will definitely be able to help you get this waiver.” They had to tell me repeatedly because, at this point, you can see how skeptical I am of anyone’s surefire solution. But I finally called the office and left a message. The following week, I heard back.

“No, sorry,” the guy said, “we only do this waiver, and you need this other waiver. There are actually five different waivers,” he admitted, “and I know it’s really confusing. But you need to call this office, in Anchorage.”

How are we supposed to get anywhere when even the professionals who are supposed to guide you through this don’t know what they’re doing because the system is so bloated?

…The Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it…

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

After that blunder, someone assured me, “You can call this number for help, these people definitely know what they’re doing, they do this for a living.” Thereupon I called the number and an answering machine picked up; it said they may (What? May?) return my call within ten business days.

But hey, to their credit, they called two days later and got my voicemail. It was a woman whose first language was definitely not English, and her message directed me to the same website that was unnavigable in the first place.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office…Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Among the many things we don’t know about this process is that all these people (the ones we’ve dealt with, at least) are actually kind, respectful, and encouraging. Maybe I was prepared for otherwise after two years of officials behaving like Gestapo who wouldn’t even respect a person’s right to breathe freely. (Those protocols really brought out the worst in humanity, didn’t they?)

Had they used their faces, not for communication, not to utter thought and feeling, not to share existence with their neighbors, but to appear what they wished to appear, and conceal what they were? And, having made their faces masks, were they therefore deprived of those masks, and condemned to go without faces until they repented?

– George MacDonald, Lilith

The difference is that during the plandemic, those officials demanded that you wear a mask, too, and they turned into freakish banshees if you refused – and ironically, instead of covering ugliness, their masks revealed what was really inside and made them more hideous than ever.

“How long must they flaunt their facelessness in faceless eyes?” I wondered. “How long will the frightful punition endure? Have they at length begun to love and be wise? Have they yet yielded to the shame that has found them?”

– George MacDonald, Lilith

But it seems like most professionals have come back to just being decent people, truly trying to help. And we need help, because the system is a convoluted mess.

It’s such an intimidating process. Court documents flooding my inbox, meetings with lawyers, interviews with court visitors. It all seems very official – and it is – but it’s also very human. And maybe this is a secret, but the formality is a cover for an extremely informal, fluid process. It, too, is just a mask.

We want to walk through the process correctly. The problem is that there’s no correct way to do it, and all the experts tell you something different (unless it’s “I don’t know,” which is alarmingly consistent).

And honestly, I would rather hear “I don’t know” than a bunch of misleading information. So this is a good step – a cultural willingness to admit humility, to let go of pride and ego, to acknowledge we’re all in this together, needing answers. How else do we make sense of the things that don’t?

Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy toward all people. For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.

– Titus 3:1-3

Of course, cooperating with a system isn’t the same as capitulating or conforming to that system, just as being “submissive to rulers and authorities” isn’t the same as sucumbing to tyranny. So we work the problem in front of us, sitting in the discomfort of not having immediate solutions. The answers are there, regardless of how ambiguous they look right now. Time will either bring the solutions to the surface, or they just won’t matter because we will have bigger things to deal with.

What I’ve really needed to hear from someone is, “Yes, it’s a mess. Yes, it’s confusing. You’re doing fine.” And praise God, the Lord brought someone who said that very thing, and it was such a comfort. (She still didn’t know how to file for SSI…but I digress).

So friend, if you are walking through something hard and complicated, and there are no clear answers and lots of confusing directions, let me tell you: Yes, it’s a mess. The world is a cleanup operation, and these are confusing times. We don’t have all the answers but Jesus does, and we have the mind of Christ so we are able to discover Kingdom solutions. We can wait for the revelation while we sit in the mystery. You’re trying and waiting and trusting? You‘re doing fine.

There’s another number sitting on my list that I’ve been referred to multiple times. Overcoming my jadedness, I finally call and a woman with a smoker’s voice answers.

“You have access to the internet?” she asks, and directs me to a website with a big yellow button to apply.

Short form, easy. Now I feel reckless and brave, and ask if she can help me navigate this other arena.

“Yep, that’s the Something-something-aging-something office. Their number is –”

“Wait, that’s the office I need?”

“Yep. Their number is…” and she gives me a local number with real people who live here in Alaska and actually answer questions.

Miracles abound.

I called the lady and she was so nice. The person with all the knowledge and resources and answers will call us next week and help us through the whole process, she said.

“Of course, you don’t have to go through our office, we’re just here to support you. You can go directly to the federal government website if you want.” And it was all I could do to not scream, No! I need you, please don’t leave me! (Of course, she hasn’t called me back yet, and it’s been over a week. So I guess that’s on my to-do list again tomorrow.)

But something that keeps recurring to me is that many of these things that seem like such a big deal – so time consuming, such hassles – end up being nothing in the long run. I don’t just mean that in perspective they are small, but that they often just dissolve into nothingburgers, distractions that just took up too much brain space when we could’ve been cultivating peace and productivity elsewhere.

The Spirit reveals what we need to know when we abide. And often we don’t need the answers as soon as we think we do, so resting in the mystery of His timing is an exercise in growing in trust and equanimity. It’s easy to slip into intimidation and pressure, but taking a step back means we won’t allow the enemy to magnify that stress in or around us.

Instead, we can counter that stress and confusion with prayer, compassion, Sudoku, and mockery of inept government systems as we expose the mask and move toward a more transparent, healthy, and secure culture. We will try and wait and trust. My big situations, your big situations – will they even matter in the big picture? I don’t know; it’s a mess out there. But you’re doing great.

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getting it right: finding grace on unknown roads

Posted on by November 22, 2023

Reagan brings me her journal so I can check the sentence she just wrote, and some days this is how it goes:

I will be done the green Book with pretty soon.

She means her math book, the one I told you about months ago, the one she’s wanted to finish since forever so she can move on to the next book. And you probably see the same errors I did, so I remind her that the words need to be in the right order and that only the first letter of this sentence needs capitalized.

getting it right: finding grace on unknown roads

She returns with this:

I will be done with the grrrn Book pretty soon.

I’m not sure if this is on purpose or if she’s just being lazy. There’s no way to tell; sometimes she knows what she’s doing, and sometimes she doesn’t. But she does know how to spell “green” so I tell her to fix it, and she returns with this:

I will be done with the grenn Book pretty soon.

And then this:

I will be done with the green pook pretty soon.

You see it? I do, so I ask, “What does ‘book’ start with?”

“B,” she says, and I tell her to fix it.

I will be done with the green Book pretty soon.

Aaaand we’re back to uppercase. “How do you make a lowercase B?” I ask.

“I make…one…bump?” Her answers almost always sound like questions.

I will be done with the green Pook pretty soon.

At this point, I’m pretty sure it’s on purpose. Yes, it’s one bump but she knows which bump it’s supposed to be.

We could do this all day, fixing one thing while adding little errors elsewhere, refusing to get it right and never making progress.

“Do you want to do school today?” I finally ask.

“Yes!!” she says, urgently.

And that’s when she fixed the sentence and brought it back, written perfectly. What’s the saying? Seventh time is a charm. Something like that.

We all fight new levels and battles on many fronts, trying to get everything right, and the details can be overwhelming. For us, one of the big new levels in this season is that three of our kids turn 18 in the next five months (!) and we’re in the process of filing for guardianship for two of them. Afton is the other one, the biological one, who just has five months left at home with us because he wants to move out as soon as he can – sayonara, adios, I hope he misses us sometimes – but of the other two, Reagan will probably always be with us and Andrey needs at least a couple more years of help with daily responsibilities and care.

It’s what we signed up for, sorta. We just never really know what we’re signing up for until we’ve lived in it for a while, and that’s probably for the best.

So last week we had our second trip in as many months to the Palmer Courthouse – clerk’s office, to be exact – to submit paperwork for guardianship, and yes, it is as boring as it sounds.

We drove through town and stood in line and went to the counter and handed over documents. I raised my right hand under oath. This part is easy; I’ve done it twice now. It’s all the other paperwork, applications, deadlines, visits, and court hearings that I’m not sure about.

Then we drove back through town on the other side to go see Grandma, who turns 92 next week. We passed Afton on the road like ships in the night and waved; he was picking up a friend who lives in her neighborhood.

Grandma’s hair swoops to the left across her forehead, and she brushes it aside. My dad’s hair does the same thing, and mine does too unless I force it to submit to the attentions of a flat iron.

She sat in her rocker and I sat in the other, and she told us stories about her aunt and uncle who built barns, and how she lived right next door to her grandparents for the first ten years of her life, and how that was the best thing ever.

It makes sense to me that she adored those grandparents, because she grew up and became like them. She’s the grandparent I most adored, too.

She kept asking how the kids were doing, and I updated her on the guardianship and how we’ve also been trying to navigate Andrey’s health issues. I mentioned a couple months ago that he had a cyst that showed up again and needed oral surgery, but six appointments later we discovered that it’s not oral surgery but reconstructive plastic surgery that will be needed because of how the cyst has destroyed some of the bone structure in his face. And that’s a battle we never saw coming. In light of his 18th birthday and guardianship proceedings coming up, the surgeon recommended we hold off on that procedure until early next year when those are completed.

We all have our stuff in crazy overwhelming seasons. Yours is probably different from ours, but we overlap in the general mayhem of living on the brink of apocalypse.

It was a short visit and as we were leaving Grandma’s, a pickup stopped in the road and the guy inside waved as we passed. We reversed back and rolled down the window; he looked like Santa but with a short beard. Seeing us closer, he grinned and apologized.

“Oh gosh, I thought you were Thornsleys!”

I grinned back, leaning toward Vin’s window. “I am, I’m the oldest granddaughter.” It couldn’t have been my hair that gave it away; I’d wrestled the flat iron that morning.

“Well! I just know the boys,” he said. “I was comin’ to tell y’all about someone encroaching on your property –” and he went on about someone’s trailer that’s half on their own property but also half on “ours,” though I couldn’t tell which one of us he was talking about.

“Which of the boys is your dad, did you say?” he finally asked.

“I’m Greg’s daughter.”

“Oh, the fuel guy?” I nod. Small town. Most people know each other, and Grandma and Grandpa moved here when “the boys” were still in school, over fifty years ago.

We exchanged names and went on in our opposite directions, passing Afton again as he brought his friend back home. We wound along the old highway back toward town and I know these curves; I grew up on them, and there’s something so comforting and familiar about feeling them in the sunshine, gently swaying left and right as they follow the Matanuska River, while we navigate all these other curves we’re so new at.

It’s not easy to tell if you’re doing something right when you don’t have a template to follow. Pioneers know this, though I never saw myself as one of them until this year. But if you have followed a new or unusual calling without a map, role model, template, pattern, or any previous experience, you probably have wondered many times if you were going the right direction when it just felt like you were moving in circles. Homeschooling, adoption, self-employment, ministry, special needs parenting, whatever…transitional generations know this, the feeling of walking and wandering and weariness, looking for a signpost that confirms you’re on the right track.

Sometimes we know what we’re doing, and sometimes we don’t – and often, the answers we get sound more like questions.

Am I doing this right? has been the refrain of my life, and I am finally understanding that it’s the wrong question. For the last year or so He keeps asking me, “Do you want to be right, or righteous?” and now I understand why – because He’s teaching me to rest in the grace of His love for me, since He knows my heart wants to look like His.

So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

– 1 John 4:16

When Reagan brings me her writing, I don’t expect her to have a perfect sentence every time. I expect her to do the things she knows, and to try with the rest. If she’s trying and fumbling but not doing it wrong on purpose, I have all the time in the world for her. It’s when she does things wrong on purpose – this is what we call transgressing – that I ask her if she really wants to make progress or if she’s deliberately self-sabotaging.

By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.

– 1 John 4:17

So I am learning that as long as my heart wants to be like His, instead of being consumed with perfection, afraid of punishment, He has all the grace in the world for me. He just wants me to resemble Him.

When my heart is at rest because it’s focused on the perfect love that casts out fear, I can trust that He’s giving me wisdom and helping me get things right, whatever the circumstances look like at any given moment. I don’t have to fear punishment for not knowing what I’m doing and for making imperfect efforts without a template to follow, because He loves our trying and investing and taking risks, and He rewards those efforts – but He rebuked the cowardly steward who buried his talent in safety.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.

– 1 John 4:18-19

I sat up late with a friend last night and confessed to her that I have often thought of every reason in the world why things were hard, or why they weren’t working out, or why I didn’t deserve this good thing, or why I did deserve that bad thing. I have spent years making excuses for the enemy, rather than resting in God’s love and agreeing with His will for me, because I felt like getting it right was my job.

But oh my gosh, it’s not.

Obedience and getting it right are not the same thing. As I’m typing this, it feels like a veil is tearing in the atmosphere. Sometimes we fear and worship all the details of obedience rather than fearing and worshiping God. Our performance goes up on a pedestal, and we climb right up there after it.

Breaking the lie is one thing, but renewing the mind is another. So the Lord pours us into this wide place with tight borders where it feels too overwhelming, like too much responsibility – and He tells us to claim the land. This is how He broadens our tent pegs, teaching us that we are bound by love, and therefore, free.

You gave a wide place for my steps under me,

and my feet did not slip.

– Psalm 18:36

A wide place for our steps seems like a great thing, but we tend to prefer more structure. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you had several good choices before you, and you hemmed and hawed about which one to take? That was a wide space.

Sometimes we’d rather have a small space and not carry the responsibility of choosing where our feet get planted. Sometimes we make ourselves small, so we feel safe, so we have less details to be responsible for, so we lower the risk of getting things wrong.

The steps of a man are established by the Lord, when he delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand.

– Psalm 37:23-24

So there is grace that covers our imperfections and unknowing, grace that flies in the face of our fear, pride, insecurity, and perfectionism. Gratitude and grace go together, because if we’re still earning our way, then we’re still taking credit…maybe not overtly, but in the back of our mind we’re still thinking, I did this.

That grace – knowing we couldn’t earn it, it’s all His love – removes the fear of shame and punishment and the next shoe dropping. No, we don’t deserve it, we deserved other. And even though the enemy convinced us that shame and grief was our penance for imperfection because we don’t deserve to be free, now we walk in gratitude, astounded by His many gifts we could never earn, achieve, or merit on our own.

But now we have them, because He paid for it.

It’s this kind of freedom that led us to celebrate at the ice cream shop that day, after the courthouse, after Grandma’s, after the stranger who recognized someone else in me. We pulled out of the ice cream shop and back onto the highway, and that’s when Afton passed us for the third time that day. We grinned shamelessly, waving our ice cream cones at him through the window as he drove past, ahead of us on the way home. And over these last few weeks I’ve felt dread and jadedness lifting, and a lightness that’s new in the midst of all these hard unknowns, because I am finally at a new level of tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.

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handle with care: the Kingdom’s response to grief & pain

Posted on by August 24, 2023

I walked down the hallway this morning toward the meeting room where we have weekly prayer. My friend whose husband died last Saturday was there, already being hugged by another friend, so I waited my turn. We prayed for her, and rejoiced for him – I’ve mentioned him to you before – and then we moved on to interceding for our church, community, nation, and world.

handle with care: the Kingdom's response to grief and pain

The world needs intercession. Maybe that’s why we’re noticing more alarms; there’s smoke everywhere. Something is definitely spiking in the atmosphere. More warfare, more attack – but also, more coming together, more standing back to back. More hugging and generosity. More looking out for each other. And we need to look out for each other.

One of my friends is losing her hair and facing hard choices about cancer treatment, and another is on alert for wildfire evacuations while her husband recovers from a chainsaw accident. We have close friends dealing with extreme financial hardship and health challenges. All around, we are fragile and broken, healing and raw, on edge and in His hands, because there’s no other place to run for safety.

In our family, we got Kavanagh’s cast off last week just in time for more medical appointments for Andrey as we navigate the medical merry-go-round of specialists with varying degrees of knowing what they are doing, and equally varying degrees of how much they charge for their particular blend of experimentation and expertise.

So far, we know there’s a CT scan and then a surgery coming up. We are praying for healing and expecting mighty things, while simultaneously calling down fire upon the racket of Big Pharma and looking for the right ENT specialist. Someone who doesn’t charge $1200 an hour to those who pay out of pocket would be greeeeeat.

Also, since I’m giving you the big family update, guardianship proceedings are coming up – we finished the courses, and the first round of paperwork goes to the Palmer Courthouse this week. And my heart is…better…I’m pretty sure it’s better, at least…about it.

One of the things that helped was, shockingly, the courses themselves. While most guardianship cases in Alaska seem to be for elderly people who need assistance, there was one case study that sounded a lot like both Andrey and Reagan. Even better, the mother in that case also felt frustrated at the need to go through a legal process (because, GAHHHH) just to simply keep caring for her child as she had been doing all along, which has been my main beef, too. But in a move that shows the government can do a few things right (grin) even the state of Alaska acknowledges those valid feelings, and explained the need for guardianship in a way that was gentle and on the family’s side. Repeatedly, they described how this is a delicate process.

And suddenly I felt the relief of not having to plow new ground. I am so tired of plowing new ground. Here, finally, I saw that someone has walked this path who wears shoes like mine, and the trail has already been somewhat cleared. A weight lifted off me.

We are fragile, broken and healing. We all need to be handled with care.

Walking gently is imperative right now, because the bull in the china shop doesn’t have eyes or ears to recognize the needs around them. These are days to move cautiously and deliberately; it’s hard to cultivate sensitivity and discernment about the times without a little stillness.

“I did not send the prophets, yet they ran; I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied.

But if they had stood in my council, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people, and they would have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their deeds.”

– Jeremiah 23:21-22

This is why we listen for His words and then pray for boldness to share them in the ways He has gifted and positioned us. It’s easy to make excuses when we’re hurting and grieving, but those things don’t let us off the hook of praying and abiding. You know what happens when we pray and abide? He tells us stuff. And often, He tell us to share about it.

Let me make a huge understatement: The Church hasn’t always been great at this.

The Church is filled with people who really aren’t familiar with the love of God, and it’s shown by how we puff ourselves up at the expense of each other. Love builds up, but knowledge puffs up – and we already know that wounded and hurting people tend to wound and hurt other people. But Kingdom culture changes that, because in Kingdom culture, we abide and surrender. Rather than festering inward, those wounds and pain draw us outward and give us wisdom to recognize similar wounds and pain in others. Oh friend, I recognize those shoes you’re wearing. They look like mine, too.

When we are tender and fragile, we naturally lean toward the friend who wields words and truth gently, who holds wisdom humbly because they won it through pain without allowing bitterness to fester. A heart that is ready to be comforted runs to the friend who carries compassion forged through experience.

– Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom’s Memoir on Sinking and Sanctification

Have you ever broken something, fixed it, and then broke it again because you weren’t careful with it? We used to have a baby gate like this – actually, we’ve had a million things like this, but the baby gate is a strong memory because we had to teach our kids to use it gently. If it was treated with respect, it worked perfectly to keep our toddler from trespassing upstairs. But if someone just swung it open or slammed it shut, it would break again.

Because things are more fragile where they’ve already been fractured. We are, too.

So we are walking in more weakness, but also more strength. We are abiding and watchful, listening and interceding. Pain and hardship haven’t won the day; God has and is continuing to take everything the enemy throws at us and turning it for our good, for His glory.

For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

– 2 Corinthians 12:10

We are wiser and healthier. More strategic, more mature. Less prone to falling for the lies and manipulations of the enemy. Less likely to act out in puffing insecurity toward those around us who are also hurting, and more equipped to create an atmosphere of healing.

We can know things for ourselves but still need to hear them from others. We can encourage each other with truth and fight each other’s darkness, but still need others to shine that truth into us on the days that fall pitch black. We stumble and get our hands and knees in the mud, and a fellow traveler says, Here, I’ll hold your lantern for you while you get back up again. There you are. Bravely now, onward.

– Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom’s Memoir on Sinking and Sanctification

We’re not looking down on those dealing with affliction and darkness because we remember our own pain and fumbling. Grief is not a competition.

But when we allow the Lord to use it to make us more like Him – the One who was acquainted with grief – it is a qualifier.

The wisdom and maturity wrought from it empowers us to lead others back into wholeness. Our brokenness helps break the path ahead, and plow the ground for others. And as we go there, we are bringing the culture with us.