Long gone are the days when I would sit here, hitting these keys until 3 am. But not long gone – in fact, extremely present and frequently of late – are the hours of overtime on the couch after the kids are in bed.
I have forgotten to eat dinner, left bowls of my beloved popcorn untouched, neglected normal writing schedules, and overlooked watering the garden. But this book is alllllmost done in spite of computer disasters and apps that eat landing pages and several unplanned medical appointments including two trips to urgent care in the last month…one for a kid who broke his arm and one for a bigger kid with a cyst who needs oral surgery again.
And we’re not quite done yet because, just for fun, we’re considering a new book distributor at the last minute.
But hey, friends…let me introduce you to the baby I’ve been pregnant with for eleven years.
“It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
– C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
This is a memoir of my post-adoption journey through the chaos of mothering and homeschooling six kids in the midst of multiple special needs and my subsequent depression and sanctification as I learned to surrender. If you read Upside Down and Oh My Soul and wondered what was really going on behind the scenes, it’s in this book.
Because we never know how far our dreams and callings will take us when we start pursuing them. The initial rose-colored ideas only get us ankle-deep along the shore, digging our toes in warm sand, before reality sinks in and we’re up to our ears in work we didn’t anticipate, opposition from out of nowhere, obstacles we don’t know how to solve, and expenses that threaten to suck us under.
At some point, we have to decide if it’s really worth the sacrifice to turn our vision into reality. And if it’s a daydream, maybe it’s not worth it. But if it’s a calling – a mission – then it’s a different story.
This, friends, is a different story.
In 2010, Vince and I started a process we didn’t know how to finish. We had four kids, a three-bedroom house, and two old vehicles. We lived frugally with one main income, one micro-business, and a little in savings. And God called us to adopt two children with special needs, bringing them home two years later to freedom, a new homeland, and our family. For good, forever.
And then hell broke loose.
We didn’t know what it would cost, or what it would take out of us. We didn’t know what we would gain, or how it would change us. We didn’t know how the story would end.
And I hate to spoil it for you, but years later I still don’t know how the story ends. We still live this story every day. But here’s what I’ve learned, and am continuing to learn, in the process:
We can talk about following our dreams all we want, but our calling is only achieved through giving up what feels safe and comfortable. It involves scary things like obedience and surrender, and letting go of our preconceived notions and penchant for control. We have to move out of the comfort zone and do hard things. We have to risk the ocean if we want to follow Him as He walks on water.
When we move out of that comfort zone, God may allow us to discover more about our own brokenness than we ever wanted to know. This is especially true when our dreams and callings entail facing someone else’s trauma in close proximity.
And I won’t lie to you – in our own weakness and brokenness, sometimes we look at the waves and can’t take it anymore, and we go under, to be refined like a rock worn smooth in the agitation of violent surf.
The sanctifying process might chafe you raw, until you think you can’t take anymore.
Doesn’t that sound fun? Still want to sign up?
The thing about obeying God in these big, scary callings is that it’s not about what we’re doing at all. It’s about what He ends up doing in us. Because as we follow Him in one task, He will lead us to another, and another, and another. And we discover that we’re not just called to a mission, but to a character of obedience – like children who watch what their Father is doing, and then they do it, too.
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.”
– John 5:19
It turns out that achieving a dream is not about tying things up in the pretty bow we always expect, because redemption and achievement rarely look like a Hallmark Christmas movie.
They usually look more like God moving in deep and lasting triumph in spite of everything the enemy throws at us.
Risk the Ocean is now available for preorder. All preorders from our site receive a free download of the book in PDF, and will be signed by me and shipped on September 19th. Order more than one book, and there will be swag tucked in, too! Bookmarks, stickers, magnets, something fun and marvelous. I’ll figure it out soon. :) Thanks so much for supporting our family. xo
Here’s a super fun craft: Take clear contact paper, cut it into dozens of hearts, and stick tiny squares of colored tissue paper to them. Hang them in the window. Gorgeous and simple, right?
It is, it really is. As long as you get someone else to remove the backing of the *&#%^!@ contact paper.
How do I know this? I spent the greater part of a church service recently peeling off these filmy contact paper backings in the preschool class and almost lost my Sunday School card. Turns out it requires intercession, praying in tongues, and friction. And not just that, because you can apply all three at once, right away, and it still takes a certain amount of time for the backing to release itself enough that you can gain purchase on the tiniest amount of paper real estate between your fingers to finally peel that sucker off.
YAY. “What are we learning about today, kids? Patience and sanctification.”
This has been the name of the game for years now. We went through another round of testing last week for one of our kids and a new report arrived in my email; some of the results were no surprise but others threw me for a loop. Conclusions were repeatedly “borderline,” “low,” and “extremely low,” and I reminded myself that this wasn’t an evaluation of my parenting, or our efforts, or our homeschooling, or our family. This was an evaluation of one child’s cognitive ability and special needs. It’s not the final word, it’s a hoop to jump through so we can take the next step.
I reminded myself of something I learned long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when I worked with other kids who had special needs: No one is as bad as their diagnoses. And that’s comforting because there are all these numbers here: Percentile Rank 5, Percentile Rank 2, Percentile Rank .1…as in, one tenth.
Those first few years matter for children. Those 40 weeks in utero matter, too – the environment, the mother’s health and wholeness, the atmosphere she lives in. But then the birth, and infancy, and toddlerhood, and all those milestones: Kids learn to roll and crawl and walk while the brain lays down tracks with synapses and dendrites, creating an expanding atlas of highways and thoroughfares with every healthy relationship and interaction. Days of wholeness create whole new countries filled with possibilities, and the passport is built in the brain to take them everywhere those neurons can reach.
But when those tracks have been derailed, tangled for the first several years through trauma and neglect, the map is much more limited. The green lights are fewer; the behaviors and deficiencies confine the borders with red lights everywhere.
I cannot quite wrap my own brain around what to think of this report. On one side, grief and bewilderment: After a few hours of testing, this paper distills someone I love and have fought so much for down to such small numbers. I wonder what we could’ve or should’ve done to change the test results. I wonder if changing those results would’ve mattered, and realize it wouldn’t. His score is not his destiny, nor is it our appraisal.
So, on the other side is confirmation: This explains so much. No wonder this has been so hard. No wonder so many basic things have been such a battle. We have been trying to navigate this map with him, pushing on the edges of it whenever we felt brave enough to see if they would unroll and expand because we know these roads should go further. At one edge, we try the stoplight and it stays red no matter how long you wait. We go to another corner of the map and the same thing happens. We try another light in a different area and it turns green for a couple seconds, so we push the gas and start to move but the light turns red again before we’ve made it across, and whap, the edge furls tightly and throws us back to staring at the red light, looking in all the other directions, wondering which way to go.
And now we have some answers – not the kind that give you direction, of course, but the kind that explain the difficult terrain a little more. It’s not our road building skills or our map reading abilities. It’s sabotage; the lights are programmed this way.
Or put another way, we’ve been trying to go 40 miles an hour in a vehicle that won’t go past third gear. When you try to drive fast in a low gear, you can only reach a certain speed before more and more effort still doesn’t make you go any faster, it just uses more gas and wears out your engine.
We have seen the map expand here and there in small ways, and this process, too, has required significant intercession, praying in tongues, and friction. And even those aren’t enough, because you can apply all three at the same time and still take forever to gain the tiniest amount of new real estate.
There’s another section of the report that addresses adaptive behavior, and it says, “These scales address what a person actually does, rather than what he or she is able to do.” And this makes sense too; the issue is not so much ability, but willingness to walk in the risk of freedom. The map really is the same size as everyone else’s. The difference is that trauma and neglect in those early years curled the edges up tight to make the space left in the middle small, safe, and predictable.
And after almost eleven years now, I relate to this. We’ve lived with red lights for so long I don’t remember what living in the green light is like, though I know we’re called to do it. In those early years we repeatedly stretched toward freedom, and the aftermath was so severe we learned to be grateful for the small map, too. The edge snapped back so violently that we learned to approach it like an electric fence.
We are intercessors and we pray for healings and miracles. We don’t see them all the time but we do see them frequently and have experienced several ourselves – cysts disappeared, desperate sickness resolved, a hernia requiring surgery healing suddenly on its own. So when we adopted, this is where we were coming from: Yes, there would be challenges, but also yes, God is a healer and He wants to heal.
One of our pastors said recently that we, as burning ones, carry God’s fire and spread it to others – but also, we could go somewhere incredibly wet and have our own fire quenched. And when he said that, something inside me started to make sense.
Yes, Andrey and Reagan have been healed of so much. But also, we had no idea the depth of healing they needed or that the process of redemption would require even more layers of healing for our entire family. We were ablaze but a fire hose went off in the middle of us, and it took years to turn that thing off. By the time we did, there was still a ring of fire around our perimeter but the inside was filled with dripping, blackened coals. We’ve been drying out for years.
What I’m confessing here is that it’s easy for me to believe God’s miracles for you and others – I can even believe Him for a lot of miracles for myself and my family – but in this hardest area I have struggled with a soggy faith. We’ve contended for healing for our kids and their special needs (which are extensive, complicated, and often invisible to non-family members), but we’ve also lived with the red lights for years, the consequences of childhood trauma and the effects of it right in our faces on a daily basis.
You might have a situation like this, too – something that has restricted and held you back for so long that the risk of breaking through it seems scarier than the pain of living with it. The red light is safe, the green light leads to scary unknowns.
We live too close to these situations to see clearly, like a page of text held right up against our face. It’s too close, too blurry; my peripheral vision is gone and I know my perspective is out of whack. I know there’s more to this than what I see, but I can’t get this situation far enough away to focus. There’s no forty-thousand foot view, there’s just this jumble in front of me. I keep trying to put the pieces together but I can never see them all at once because they crowd too close.
I don’t believe our kids can’t be healed. But I fight cynicism and jadedness, afraid to get my hopes up too much. Isn’t it stupid, the games we play with ourselves? We try to protect our hearts from disappointment by choosing constant anxiety and suffering. Because that’s SO much nicer.
But we were made to live in freedom with the green light. So far I only know two ways to get there, and we can only do one of them for ourselves. The other we have to do for each other.
The first one is surrender. Surrendered living is choosing to live inverse, with your body turned inside out, vulnerability exposed. I have to let go of my fear, my desire for control, comfort, and safety, my worship of the mediocre that is less than what He’s called us to. I have to be willing to push the edge of the map and risk it electrocuting me. I have to process which red lights are real and which are fake, because a lot of them are green lights overlaid with fear and lies. And those ones? We can run those red lights.
The second thing, which can help the first thing happen, is to intercede wildly for each other. I want you to believe the things for me that I can’t see yet, as I believe those things for you. I won’t disregard your pain or make light of what you’ve been through. I won’t look down on you for the injuries you sustained when the edge of your map violently threw you backward; I have plenty of those scars, too. But I will believe for these things that feel so impossible for you because I’ve seen Him answer them before in others. I know your red lights are meant to be green, and the edge of your map can’t electrocute me. I know your coals are meant to burn brightly again.
When we pray over someone’s grief without judging them, we anonymously bring the fire to the hard, cynical, soggy places of their heart, and in the depths things begin to change. We might not see it on the surface but that’s okay because it’s not our business. Intercession and carrying the fire is our business – what the fire does is God’s business.
The edges thaw, then loosen and uncurl. We can start to see what’s hidden beyond, and curiosity overcomes our fear. The desire for freedom overrides desire for safety and control, and we look at the red light in front of us, wiggle the gear shift a little as we drive in circles around the perimeter, feeling the changes from second to third gear.
You know, something’s odd about that light; it’s darker than the rest. Look closely and you can see where the film is peeling.
It’s green underneath.
Someone must be praying for us because suddenly third gear no longer appeals and we surrender, dropping the hammer into fourth. We run the red light – there’s no opposition, no danger, it’s been green all along – and the map unfurls in surrender. We raise our hands in worship, exposing our vitals, and He reaches in and heals us.
Bedtime. I rolled over and tried to pull the pillow into place, and felt something tweak in my shoulder.
“Great,” I muttered, “tomorrow people will ask why I’m gimping around and I’ll have to tell them, ‘I’m 46, and I hurt my shoulder while wrestling with my pillow.’”
“Just tell them you did it in bed,” Vin said. “Let them use their imagination.”
And that did sound like a better idea.
Sometimes though, we can’t let people use their imagination. Sometimes their imaginations are less than gracious. And sometimes they believe the thing that seems most convenient but furthest from reality. Some things have to be clarified. And often the more important those things are, the harder they are to communicate.
For example, all week long I had a difficult conversation coming up. I had prayed and asked others to pray. But still, I was dreading it; I wondered if I should just not pursue it. Maybe I could get out of it.
So like every mature Christian, I tried that tactic in prayer:
I don’t want to do this, I told the Lord. I don’t know if I can do this.
You need to, though, He said. You know how to do it.
I don’t trust myself to do it right, though.
Do you trust Me? He asked.
Yes…but I don’t trust them. I don’t know how they’ll respond.
Do you trust Me? He repeated.
Of course I do. So I gave my feelings to Him (over and over, you know how this goes sometimes) and initiated the conversation. And the Lord gave me not only the wisdom and firmness I needed, but also the calm demeanor, composure, and discernment to say everything that needed to be said as I stood my ground. I did not waver; there was nothing on my list that was left unsaid.
God showed me again that He is faithful to work through us even when we feel unable and uncertain.
And that situation has been really good to look back on because a few months ago we learned about a whole new part of the special needs adoption process that we didn’t realize we signed up for almost eleven years ago. It’s called guardianship.
Maybe some of you are familiar with this. Maybe you’ve dealt with it and it seemed like no big deal. But for our family it feels like a Really Big Deal and we didn’t see it coming, and in some ways I feel stupid because it seems like we should have known about it or at least been given a heads up somewhere in the hours upon hours we spent in trainings and adoption paperwork.
For the equally uninitiated, it’s this: With their special needs and delays, our adopted kids will not be able to take care of themselves upon turning 18, when they magically become adults in the state of Alaska. This part wasn’t a surprise; we knew when we met Reagan that we were taking on a much bigger task than we originally thought and that she would always live with us. We do expect Andrey to be able to care for himself someday, though not as soon as he hits that magic number. What we did not realize is that continuing to care for them requires the legal activation of guardianship, and it is a fairly lengthy, invasive, legal process of courts, reports, and paperwork that is akin to the adoption process itself, except that it continues for the rest of our lives until we die.
Even after going through the original process, emptying our savings, and caring for them for over ten years, we must prove ourselves all over again to the government that we are able and willing to continue doing for our children what we’ve been doing all along. We cannot leave it to their imagination; it must be communicated. Again.
And that feels wrong to me. Oh, I know the reasons for it; you don’t need to lecture me. There have been exceptional cases of terrible people who take advantage of the system and do neglectful and sometimes horrific things to children. That is part of why we chose to adopt in the first place. The bigger problem is that more often than not, the terrible people out there doing terrible things to children are part of the system and work for the government.
So to treat all parents as guilty until proven innocent – over and over again – is unjust, inefficient, and a lousy use of resources. Putting the onus on parents who have already been through the fire and devoted years of their lives to caring for these children seems to be a “look here, not there” strategy.
But what can you do? There’s no other option. As it’s been explained to me, the reason it’s necessary is because Reagan cannot care for or make choices for herself, and without guardianship, if she were injured and needed to go to the hospital after she’s 18, we would not be able to make choices for her or authorize her care, either.
And yet if that situation arose, what then? Someone (a police officer, hospital staff, or some government worker) would arbitrarily end up making those decisions on her behalf, even though they would have no history with her, know absolutely nothing about her, and, ironically, they would not have completed the process of guardianship, either. But we, her parents, are required to jump through the bureaucratic hoops in order to continue doing for her what we’ve been doing all along. See how this works?
So here we go. We cannot leave things to the government’s imagination, so we will prove ourselves again by filling out more reams of paperwork and going through more hours of trainings and meetings so the government can check off their boxes, which is more important to them than actually spending all those hours with our children or nurturing our family, which is what good parents actually do.
Yeah. I know, I’m a little bent outta shape about this.
The pressure wells and I am aware of every breath because I am inhaling deeply and deliberately, willing the oxygen to go in and the stress to go out. And then I eat a caffeinated energy bar because augmenting anxiety with the jitters seems like a capital idea.
I go downstairs to water the plants, and as I look at these tiny seedlings, I persist in telling myself the truth. The feelings want to be louder, but the truth is what needs to win the day:
The Lord knows this whole process.
He is protecting our family.
He has prepared us and is continuing to prepare us.
What surprises us does not surprise Him.
This won’t be wasted time; this will be found time.
This will be for our good, because He causes all things for our good. This will expand the Kingdom as we surrender to Him in it, and faithfully walk through it.
Nothing can threaten us.
That’s the thing that really gets me: It feels threatening and invasive. It feels like it’s sending us back to the beginning, and the beginning was so hard.
But wait, no, we’re focusing on truth and not feelings, so I keep going back to the truth. I plant those seeds deep, deep down so they will take root and grow. And it’s all well and good while I’m watering my lettuces and garlic, but as soon as I’m back upstairs on the couch researching the process, anxiety steamrolls through, scattering resolve and making me take deep, shaky breaths all over again. And I’m right back to telling Him, I don’t want to do this.
You need to, though, He tells me again. Do you trust Me?
I do trust Him. I don’t trust a lot of people, though. We’ve been burned so many times when they’ve used their imaginations, appointed themselves as authorities, or assumed something that wasn’t true. I’ve learned that outsiders can be dangerous and painful to special needs families and kids.
For years Reagan had a tiny, tiny bed. We tried giving her a twin-sized bed and she hated it; she slept on the outermost top corner of it because…well, use your imagination. She had a tiny bed at six years old when we met her, about half the size of a toddler mattress. I don’t know what her experience with bigger beds was, and she didn’t like the one we gave her. So Vin made her a small one that she did like, and it saved space in a bedroom that was shared by three girls at the time. But if you came to our house and saw her tiny, tiny bed, you would wonder. And I wouldn’t blame you for wondering. But I would blame you if you judged us for it without knowing the reason behind it.
A couple years ago we went on a short hike with someone we’d only met once before. A few days later I learned that this person had noticed Reagan walked awkwardly (because she does) and kept stepping out of her shoes (because she does). They assumed it was because her shoes didn’t fit her, so they generously offered to buy her some.
Do you see how that’s not really generous, though? They assumed we weren’t providing for her, that we hadn’t bothered to purchase shoes that fit her. They didn’t ask us, didn’t know anything about her, had never spent any time with her. They just assumed that the way she walked and acted was because of neglect and lack of finances on our part.
(Side note: Our generosity should never puff ourselves up or put someone else down. It should never be to exalt ourselves over someone else. Our generosity isn’t from us anyway, it is from God and we are merely the conduit and clerk He is going through.)
Why, when people have the opportunity to use their imagination, do they use it so badly?
But here I am, doing the same thing, because I’m imagining that the people on the other end of this guardianship process will be as ignorant and unhelpful as many that we’ve dealt with before.
You’re all safe, the Lord says. I’m right here with you. Nothing can threaten and harm you.
As a friend and pastor reminded me a few days ago as he prayed for us, the government is on His shoulders. The Lord’s not asking us to surrender anything to the government; we’re just surrendering to Him.
It’s a process that must be completed and endured. Knowing we are sheltered, safe from threat or invasion, and assigned to walk powerfully through it keeps us peaceful in the process.
So He’s teaching us to trust Him in new ways with the unexpected. We can trust Him even when we don’t trust ourselves or others. We can trust Him in our vulnerability, with surrendering to a process we would not have chosen but can expect Him to bring good out of, because He is our guardian: our keeper, protector, caregiver, champion, preserver, sentinel, and shepherd. And He’s showing us how to be more like Him.
Praying for you,
Shannon
P.S. If you need some deeper content on being burned, dealing with forgiveness and resentment, and/or you want to stop feeling threatened by those who have burned you, this is what we’re addressing in the February newsletter for premium subscribers, coming out in a few days. Upgrade for that here – there’s a free trial and also a reduced group rate. And if you need this content but it’s not in your budget right now (have you even SEEN the cost of groceries lately?!) just let me know and I’d love to comp your subscription for free, gratis.
Also! I made a little announcement recently and shared the first excerpt of my new book last week. That’s available to premium subscribers, too.
P.P.S. Links for you!
Incredible sermon from Pastor Craig Cooney: Four Words for 2023. Give yourself a minute to acclimate to is accent; the Irish do wild tings with vowels. ;)
Why is sudden cardiac arrest suddenly becoming normal, and why are those who should be talking about it refusing to do so? Great post here from Mr. Guerra.
Why do we abide and obey? Right here, in less than a minute.
