We can do hard things.

For example, I wasn’t sure I was up for it, but it turns out I can empty an entire plate of nachos in under fifteen minutes and still make it on time to a Zoom meeting.

Life is extraordinarily different now, isn’t it? But I don’t just mean since 2020; our life has been changing for a long time.

This time in 2012, we had half as many kids. We were in the process of adopting two children on the opposite side of the world, and we had no idea (NO IDEA) that two more boys were coming after that, in 2015 and 2018.

In 2012, had I known what our family would walk through, I probably would’ve backed out.

Yeah, I know it sounds terrible. I’ve heard virtuous-sounding adoptive parents repeatedly say, “I’d do it all over again,” but I’m not one of them. Those people are either better than me, stronger than me, or haven’t come close to what we’ve gone through.

And I’m okay with any of those options; this isn’t a competition.

I know me, and I know these last nine years. And if you’ve been reading along with us, you know, too – it’s been hard. Harder than I could ever tell you. The always-rainbows-and-sunshine blogs do a disservice to adoptive, foster, and special needs families, and I’ve been as honest with you here as I could while still trying to protect our privacy.

In the last nine years I have faced deep fears I didn’t even know I had. We walked through dark times and didn’t have a choice about looking those fears in the face. I questioned God, argued with God, and for a while, I stopped trusting God. No, I don’t mean that I stopped trusting Him for others – that’s much easier. I just stopped trusting Him for myself and my family.

So many times, I was afraid one of our biological kids wouldn’t make it through those years.

So many times, I have been afraid that one of our adopted kids wouldn’t make it very far into their future years.

And there was one time in those first couple of years when I almost didn’t make it. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve even started to open up about that. It’s been a slow unfolding, because I needed to understand it first.

Don’t ever stop praying for your adoptive and special needs friends. The contrast of darkness and hope is violent, and when the next shoe keeps dropping (and how many shoes could there possibly be, anyway?) we have a hard time seeing goodness and light. It’s a dangerous time to start agreeing with the enemy in despair, doubt, and fear, and if you have a friend in that place, they will almost never tell you how truly dark those darkest days are.

I think it’s okay to take a long time to recover from seasons. After a while, they become part of our story and we seem to be able to integrate them. We can talk about them without too many automatic reactions going on and we can even write about them.

But that doesn’t mean we’re completely recovered. I’m now kinder to myself. I treat myself with more grace. If I find that I’m overreacting to a threatening situation, I take time to think about where I’ve been. And I remember that the Lord has been with me.

– Naomi Reed, My Seventh Monsoon

We wanted to be His hands and feet to these kids, but we had no idea how much we would need the rest of the body’s support, to be hands and feet to us. And by the time we started to figure it out, it seemed like it was too late.

But it’s never too late, even if you still have years of hard things to walk through.

When we refer to people as the “hands and feet of Jesus” what we really mean is that these people saw something that most people didn’t notice, and then they acted on it. Usually we think of it as service to others. Often, that service to others is predicated by investment in one’s personal growth – hours spent studying or practicing a skill so we have more to leverage for the Kingdom.

But sometimes we don’t have that much time to prepare. And sometimes we take steps to prepare and it just doesn’t even come close to what is actually needed.

You…went through all the requirements, trainings, meetings, interviews, and red tape. It was crazy-thorough. Then you brought your child home.

And you learned that all that preparation was like going through earthquake survival drills – how to do first aid, how to take cover, how to evacuate safely – versus actually living through an 8-point earthquake. It was like the difference between learning CPR versus actually having to administer it to someone who has no pulse.

Some of our kids came to us carrying grief and trauma equivalent to that 8-point earthquake.

– Upside Down: Understanding and Supporting Attachment in Adoptive and Foster Families

Hands and feet are helpless without the rest of the body. We needed people to notice us, so we could take turns being hands and feet. Sometimes we are the doers, other times we support others as they do the doing.

After the reading from the Law and the Prophets, the rulers of the synagogue sent a message to them, saying, “Brothers, if you have any word of encouragement for the people, say it.”

– Acts 13:15

And now in these calmer days, He calls us to push these issues and bring awareness and support. I’m convinced that many of the problems adoptive parents face are a direct result of adoption “advocacy” done by those who consider themselves experts but have never actually experienced what they’re talking about.

We move one step forward, one step back, just like the kids we’ve been trying to love into healing for the past nine years, because almost every major step forward is met with spiritual attack. Often that attack manifests in some misbehavior in those kids, so the very thing people think we are now experts in can still make us feel like failures. It keeps us humble, so there’s no danger of getting comfortable on a pedestal.

So we, too, have tried to go back and forth in tentative steps: I can’t take it anymore, pull back, and we try to retreat…but there is no retreating in the Kingdom when God has called you to obedience. And He has.

But what if our current struggle isn’t the end game, because there’s birth ahead? He never lets up in calling us to do the next brave thing. He is always about birthing victory and wholeness.

Whether the hard things were caused by our own choices, or those of others, or something completely unexplainable (because if we’ve learned anything from Job, it is that we don’t want to be the ones who try to explain away everything), suffering combined with humility is the long view that includes hope and blessing at the end.

Those who live without fear are the most free and powerful people on earth. There is nothing that strikes more fear into the camp of the enemy than such a people walking the earth again.

– Rick Joyner

The narrowing of the path makes the victory more acute – it becomes a bullseye, of sorts, to our breakthrough. And if we can get to that after conquering the darkness, there’s no telling how many more victories are still to come.

Friends, we have come a long ways, but we still have a long way to go. We have not arrived.

But I am finally, fully, and completely confident that someday we will.

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This is an excerpt from Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom’s Memoir of Sinking and Sanctification.

You can find more adoption resources — not the boring textbook stuff, or the rainbows-and-unicorns stuff, but the real, raw, in-the-trenches stuff — right here.