Category Archives: marriage

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.

the challenge: working through it together

Posted on by February 13, 2023

Every year we choose new books to read (do you do this, too?), but last year we started something different – we did a reading challenge. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it?

But it’s not, really. Just search the internet and you’ll find a hundred variations. Iree joined us and the three of us teamed up together to read 104 books. Two books per week seems like a lot, but between all of us, it seemed doable.

But we quickly discovered that it wasn’t, quite.

the challenge: working through it together

It wasn’t the number of books, but the categories that threw us. And I understand that the point of a challenge is to, well, challenge you, but there was only one slot for “a book you have no interest in” and I own too many books that I actually want to read to bother digging around with so many categories that were on there that I don’t.

So, taking a languid approach to it, we crossed the boring/inapplicable categories off as we went and replaced them with creative ones that were less boring (cough) more to our taste. Because seriously, I value theology and Christian living, but there were SO MANY of them on there, and absolutely nothing on writing, crafts, psychology, ancient history, criminology, or any of the other weird stuff we also really like.

And by the end of the year our list was a mess, but it was much more fun, and yes – we were still challenged.

This year we did it again, but started off with a clean list. We made sure the categories were both realistic and interesting right off the bat. We crowded around the kitchen island, just throwing ideas out there.

A book written by someone you know. A book with a character you’d want to be friends with. A book about a disaster. A book about personal growth. A book Shannon quoted in one of her books. A book of 800 pages or more. A memoir or autobiography. A book by Dickens.

“A book on Napoleonic history,” Vin suggested.

“Uhh…” Iree and I looked at each other.

“Only if you’re going to read it,” she said. (He said he would.)

Cham came in and we asked her for suggestions. And if you don’t know her, you will after hearing her ideas:

“A book about biology…a book on dissecting. Ohh! A book on cadavers!”

Yeah. Well…we only added one of those ideas; I’ll let you guess which.

There’s so much that we don’t know. We’ll read hundreds, thousands, of pages this year, and aside from the people we hang out with and the time we spend in prayer, very few things will influence our growth like these pages. So it’s important to choose good ones, and to enjoy the time spent with them.

I’m not kidding myself; I know I won’t remember most of what I read. I won’t like or agree with everything that I read. But even without remembering all the facts and storylines and characters and historical figures, we will be changed. The pages will leave an impression that wasn’t there last year.

Last year I started reading Plutarch’s Lives alongside Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Several months in, I realized my mistake. I thought they would reinforce each other, but usually I just get more confused as I try to untangle them from each other every week.

But I am learning.

I don’t remember all the individual lives in Plutarch, and I couldn’t tell you the exact timeline in Gibbon. But what I can tell you is an impression of these cultures and times. I can tell you that there were leaders who had wisdom for the ages, including ours. And there were also leaders who were so abhorrent in their depravity and disregard for the lives of others that the horrors they committed are hard to believe.

But they are in the history books. We generally don’t argue with them.

So, quick question, because I have to go there – why do people disbelieve or disregard the horrors we hear about today? Why are we so quick to mock and accuse people of being conspiracy theorists when they share information about celebrities and politicians doing abhorrent things?

Is it because they’re not in the history books yet? Is it because we have no interest in those categories?

Is it because those topics challenge us too much?

Or is it because we are their contemporaries, and their proximity to our own lives makes us uncomfortable? Because if these things are happening in the world we live in (and they are – it takes very little research to discover it, though you’ll have to use a search engine that doesn’t censor to do it, and you absolutely should not do so without being prayed up), then either a) we might be somewhat responsible that they exist, or b) we might need to do something about it so they no longer exist.

And those aren’t good, easy, fun options. It’s much more comfortable to shoot the messenger, lump it all as conspiracy theory and applaud the censorship that silences them, and move along with our noses heads held high.

I’ve heard some people disavow information simply because it didn’t match their personal experience. And I’m grateful they haven’t personally experienced anything that horrific, but our personal experiences do not define or limit the reality of other people experiences. It is arrogant, narcissistic, and foolishly ignorant to act like it does.

We still have so much to learn.

Hear me, friend: Children chained to beds and starved was not in my personal experience until we got involved in adoption.

Children who weighed 24 pounds at age four were not in my personal experience until we started our adoption paperwork. We converted kilos to pounds in astonishment; it had to be a miscalculation. But it wasn’t.

Children who were so neglected that they were only nine pounds at nine years old were not in our personal experience until we got involved with the people who were adopting them.

Our lack of personal experience did not prevent their existence or the abuse. It only proved our ignorance.

Our personal experience is not the epitome of reality. It is arrogant to assume that our x amount of years in any field (professional, personal, or otherwise) qualifies us to deny the reality of someone else’s differing experience, especially when it comes in the form of testimony with evidence and witnesses.

Just because something is so devastating that it is hard to believe, doesn’t mean it isn’t actually true.

And just because you don’t find information about fraud, horrific child abuse, or other crimes perpetrated by the elite on mainstream media (which no longer even attempts to hide how blatant their censorship is) doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means they want us to think it doesn’t…and that should lead us to some very important questions about what they have to lose.

There are many things that are hard to believe, but are nevertheless reality, regardless of how uncomfortable they make us feel, or how much we hate those categories.

And coming to understand that – and working through it together, with respect and love – may be the real challenge we all go through this year.