Category Archives: grief

made to grow: why we surrender to win

Posted on by November 22, 2021

There are seasons of motherhood when I spend all day saying stupid things like “No, you may not swing the cat in the pillowcase,” and “No, you may not take the cat outside on a leash,” and “No, you may not put the baby overalls on the cat,” and also (lest you think every wild idea around here involves a cat) “Why are you on that part of our roof?” By the time we make it to bedtime, our sons think putting pajamas on is a contact sport and I am so sick of refereeing the game that I want to eject everyone from it.

made to grow: why we surrender to win

That’s just normal parenting. Throw in special needs or health issues or a major home repair, and everything feels overwhelming and out of proportion. Life is hard, full of real problems that platitudes have no answers for. In those seasons, we dread the morning and the new day. We do not know what the future holds, but if past performance is any indicator of future results, it seems safer to just stay in bed.

Some of my kids have special needs, and usually those needs are far more behavioral than physical. Sometimes they just refuse to grow and move forward, and there is nothing I can do to move them past the place they’ve dug their heels in.

And the thing I have learned — and am still learning — is that parenting, adoption, and special needs are not necessarily pass/fail endeavors. Because the child makes his or her own choices, and eventually the child has to learn to clean up their own mess. We all do, right?

We’re all meant to grow. And the more a child refuses to grow, the more God grows me. Either way, God brings healing and wholeness. It’s just more fun when we don’t resist it.

If God is giving you the opportunity to grow and heal in these days, to rip something out and start over again, then for the love of all that is holy, do not squander it. Do not shy from the Lord’s probing questions, gentle correction, or nudges toward alignment and surrender. Our joy is at stake in these opportunities to clean up the mess.

We have to do the heart-work of wholeness and forgiveness, of understanding our triggers, of maturing past that old, unattractive hang up, whatever it is. The healing can come in just a few minutes or it can take years, but the timeline rests on our own willingness to surrender.

Here’s a good word for us: The sun doesn’t insist on shining on everything all the time; it surrenders every day. It yields to clouds and isn’t diminished by the presence of something that blocks its light. It’s not in competition with any other light or any other thing that gets in its way and creates a shadow. It just keeps shining, doing what it was made to do.

Every night, it is beautiful in surrender. And regardless of how cold or cloudy it was the day before, it never fails to rise the next day. That might be a word for us, too.

Sooner or later things start to take shape and we can see what the Maker is up to. And it’s always good…eventually.

But surrender is hard. Haaaaarrrd, say it with me in four syllables. If it wasn’t, would it be surrender at all? But it is also powerful, because surrender is also birthing, bringing new life. And when we see the fruit on the other side of it, we see the beauty and joy and breakthrough that come from laying down our agenda for His.

It doesn’t matter if it’s homeschooling, writing a book, parenting, learning anything new, or finally mastering the act of getting dressed in the morning without tangling up your pantleg and tripping yourself (hey, I only write about what I know), we are always learning and growing.

Or, we ought to be. There are those who choose to stagnate, but that’s probably not you.

So, a word of encouragement: If you are feeling the burn of an uphill climb, it’s because you’re going somewhere. Stretching. Moving. Making strides. Gaining ground. Advancing. Moving forward. Going places.

Once you surrender, the unexpected won’t stop you. Mistakes, once realized, confessed and yielded to God, will only advance you further.

So, press in – there is no setback God won’t use to move you forward when you walk in surrender to Him.

____________

This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume 6: Surrender to Win. The ABIDE series is now complete, and it’s available here and everywhere books are sold.

the cost: a challenge to adoption agencies, from the families who are living it

Posted on by June 19, 2023

Thirty-seven thousand dollars. That’s how much it cost to adopt two of our children.

And that was – forgive me – a screaming deal. We adopted them at the same time, from the same country, on one adoption fee instead of two separate fees. Many adoptions cost that much or more just for one child.

the cost: a challenge to adoption agencies, from the families who are living it

Talking about the numbers and the money bothers me because children are not commodities. Ignorant people joke to adoptive families about buying or selling children, revealing their cluelessness about the reality of child trafficking. Adoption expenses are not a sale; it’s more like ransom money to get children out of institutions where they are languishing and put them into a family where they can heal.

And if you’ve adopted or have been a reader here for any length of time, you already know. Healing can take a long time.

And healing is worth it.

But here’s why I’m bringing up the money and numbers: Those costs do not come close to those incurred after adoption, literally and metaphorically. And people need to know that. People making insensitive jokes need to know; people thinking adoptive families get paid (what the what?!) need to know.

Potentially adoptive families need to know.

In discussing all the adoption costs with different agencies, it was never required (or even recommended) that we save for therapy. Personal health insurance was required, yes, but that doesn’t begin to cover the entire costs of therapy and counseling for multiple people in a family – parents, adoptive children, biological children – who undergo the turmoil, trauma, and secondary trauma those early adoptive years often involve. When you are replacing a destroyed mattress every six months for the first two years and repairing or replacing other damaged necessities, the copay for therapy becomes out of the question since it’s not a basic need.

We applied thousands of dollars to our international travel expenses. Hundreds of dollars were set aside to be converted to euro and lev just for meals. But also, it would have been good if we knew to set aside an account for therapy — $3000 to $5000 would have been a good start.

Why don’t adoption agencies require or recommend this? I mentioned it to a friend, and her response was, “They’ll never do it. Adoption agencies are making a sale, not equipping people for life after adoption.”

It sounds jaded, but from my experience I have to agree with her. Are we wrong? I hope adoption agencies will prove it.

It’s not just adoption agencies, though. Friends who adopted through foster care and private adoption said this:

NO ONE PREPARED US. And we know they knew. Other families were and are our saving grace in this area of support.

It would have taken just one home study writer or one agency worker thirty minutes to give us the real low down, and no one ever did.

I contacted our adoption agency three times about Upside Down after it gained the merit of being featured on Focus on the Family. I told them we hear from adoptive families all the time. Most of these families are desperate, and almost all of them tell us that Upside Down has the information they wish they had before they adopted. So I asked our adoption agency to consider making it one of their required (or at the very least, recommended) materials.

Three times I contacted them. Why three times? Because I never heard back. Not once.

We adopted two children with that agency. We are one of their families. And I never heard back.

Maybe my friend is right. Maybe they are more interested in the sale, and not interested in equipping families. Maybe they are concerned about losing a sale if they scare people off.

(Maybe, after the obligatory first two years of intrusive home visits by a 20-something social worker whose sole parenting experience was with her biological toddler in a two-income family, they figured we’d consumed the entire plethora of support they offered and we were on our own. Or maybe that was just us.)

But here’s the thing: If a family is easily scared off after reading a 100-page book or being told that part of the requirement for adoption is to save a few thousand dollars in an account for future therapy, those families should not be adopting in the first place. This is an easy filter.

I’ll be contacting that agency again soon, and several others also. We’ll see if the response is better this time. (UPDATE: After some emails back and forth over about 6 months, our former agency last told us they got a copy of the book and were still reviewing it — it’s a 40 minute read, front to back — and then declined to return my phone call or last email. So it sadly looks like they are in the business of selling adoptions, and not supporting adoptive families.) And if you are an adoptive family, you are welcome to contact your agency and recommend materials you wish you’d had when you were in process, too.

Meanwhile, though, what can we do for adoptive families now? How can we encourage and empower them, and help them toward wholeness? What can we offer to potential adoptive families who are rightly curious about what they might be signing up for?

We can be honest with them, because what we’ve learned hasn’t come cheap. We can be as transparent as possible while still honoring the privacy of our kids and families.

The core of adoption support is not going to come from professionals who don’t have personal adoption experience. Those services are basic and they can help, but the most impactful support to adoptive families is going to come from other adoptive families who have been there. If that weren’t the case, one of the most common things we hear from adoptive families wouldn’t be “I would never tell this to someone who hasn’t adopted, but I know you understand.”

But that’s what we hear, because we do understand. Nine years later, we’re still walking this out every day.

So here is some of that honesty from a mom who’s been there: Don’t Make Me Use My Mom Voice: Adoption, Attachment, & Discipline, a 1-hour training by yours truly. This was originally requested by an adoption agency who is actively equipping their families, and now we’re making it available to other adoptive (or potentially adoptive) families who need it. Foster families, too. This training will help you feel more equipped in all your parenting and relationships and personal wholeness.

We need people who have been where we are – and are still walking that road – to come alongside us and say, You’re not alone. You’re right, you really do know what you’re talking about even when you don’t feel like you know nearly enough to do this. This is really hard, but we’re going to get through it.

And that’s cheaper than therapy.

in january: how fasting declutters our soul

Posted on by January 2, 2023

I heard a book slam shut, and Vin announced, “Now that it’s January, I have no motivation to finish that book.”

“Which book?” I asked, not looking.

“Any book,” he said.

“I hope you’re not referring to the one you’re supposed to be writing.”

And praise God, he wasn’t.

in january: how fasting declutters our soul

We’re only a couple of weeks into the year and I’ve already slammed a book shut, too. It started promising but then sunk into coarse humor, and while snark is probably both my highest spiritual gift and my love language, I have no patience for vulgarity.

(I guess I should point out that I’m not referring to the book I’m writing, either. It’s a fair question, though.)

So out those books went, along with all the other things we’re decluttering in the New Year.

The need to declutter is more dire than ever because Kav hit the fast, destructive crawling-standing-grabbing stage of babyhood months ago and he’s going to start walking any second. But it’s okay; now that Vince and I are in our forties, as parents of eight kids with miiiiles of experience behind us – a whole toolbelt of wisdom, an armory full of tactics and methods to navigate every stage of childhood –we now know exactly what to do:

It’s called “choosing your battles.” Which means, we just started moving things to the library.

And this, too, is wisdom.

First it was a coffee table and then a huge potted plant, but then we added the Christmas tree. And then we squeezed in the card table for Christmas puzzles.

I should point out that the library is only 9×11, and it already contained floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and an upright piano. By the time we were done, it was so stuffed that you couldn’t reach many books without first moving a small piece of furniture or an umbrella plant the size of a mini-fridge.

But now we are moving things out in reverse, both in the library and the rest of the house. It’s a deep breath in, and a long exhale, and the white space is reemerging. Christmas décor, unworthy books, jars of unidentifiable pantry items, unmatched mittens and gloves worn to shreds: all packed, given, or thrown away.

For the last several years, January has been a season of prayer and fasting for our family, and that is a refining, purging, decluttering work in itself.

I will take my stand at my watchpost
    and station myself on the tower,
and look out to see what he will say to me,
    and what I will answer concerning my complaint.

– Habakkuk 2:1, ESV

Every year it brings layers of breakthrough, but never in the ways we expect. And the answers usually come in phases – a little clarity here in this season, a little more direction a week or two later (sometimes in an entirely different area), and some serious resolution after a month or two.

And the Lord answered me:

“Write the vision;
    make it plain on tablets,
    so he may run who reads it.”

– Habakkuk 2:2, ESV

I’ve been reading about the watchmen in Habakkuk and the weeds in the garden in Matthew – and God is extravagantly efficient, unwilling to let sin continue because He loves the sinners so much, but He’s also equally unwilling to waste such an opportunity to grow His people.

In this season He is also cleaning house — washing us clean, because we are His temple. He is revealing, exposing, and taking care of the clutter, clearing the way for margin and white space as He aligns things into the right places. But He’s also addressing grime and dark corners of vulgarity, pulling things into the open so the atmosphere can be one of fresh air and light, as it’s meant to be.

And sometimes during fasting there’s this gnawing pit in the stomach that has nothing to do with food hunger. It’s a heart-hunger that wonders if grief – this fasting from the thing we’ve lost, or waiting for the breakthrough we feel desperate for – is accomplishing anything. We wonder if anything is happening while we wait.

“For still the vision awaits its appointed time;
    it hastens to the end—it will not lie.
If it seems slow, wait for it;
    it will surely come; it will not delay.”

– Habakkuk 2:3, ESV

I’ve shared before that when we moved to this house, we learned about fasting, non-food-wise: We were fasting from everything that was packed up, and also fasting from our sense of home and having a place to settle into. Keep in mind, we still possessed all those things, but they were packed, so we were choosing not to access them. And as we felt the absence of those things – fasting from them – we prayed for breakthrough, for answers, and for a place to settle in. Just like we do when fasting from food, we feel the hunger, and the hunger triggers us to pray. This kind of fasting was just a different kind of hunger.

It turned out though, we were already home, and God knew all along, of course.

And praying for breakthrough is a fast of its own, when we are fasting from the things we are longing for – the answers, the provision, the specific things we are wanting and hoping and praying for. It reveals the things we’ve been distracted with, and realigns our priorities, and declutters our soul.

“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,
    but the righteous shall live by his faith.”

– Habakkuk 2:4, ESV

We still have antique Christmas ornaments hanging in our front windows, and a family of porcelain snowmen congregating above our kitchen cabinets. This weekend they’re finally getting packed away – and with any luck, we’ll even finish that puzzle we started at Christmas.

Copperlight Wood: In January - how fasting declutters our soul

And we are fasting, and the words go in, and the words go on paper, and the words are spoken, and He, the Word, is teaching us the awe-full power of words because He is the Word Himself – and He will always have the first word, and the last word, on our situations.