The noise could almost make your heart stop. Your mind tries to process whether it is a scream or a cry, an unnatural wail that sounds like a mythological animal dying, heaving its last gasps of breath.

Then it stops…and you realize the kids are just blowing through blades of grass. Is any other innocent summer pastime as guilty of inducing heart attacks as this one? It’s just grass blades and air. Nothing to be alarmed by.

But that knowledge doesn’t keep you from almost peeing your pants when the sound comes out of nowhere.

Eventually, though, you get used to it. The noise isn’t any less annoying, but it no longer stops you in your tracks and gives you a panic attack.

You recognize what it is. You know it’s not a threat, and you continue on with what you were doing.

Parenting changes us, and the more we surrender to the process, the more He refines us. He is making us more like Him. And simultaneously, paradoxically, He is making each of us, you and me, more like the unique you and me we were always meant to be.

Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before Him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything.

– 1 John 3:18-20

He knows what kind of mother and father our kids need. And He knows what kind of kids we needed to (ahem) sanctify us, as well.

Unfortunately, those things that refine us the best tend to be things that grate against us the most.

This daily consistency is not my jam. I’m also not great at it naturally. I’m more of a free spirit.

– Lacey Steel, adoptive mom

I hate to tell you this, but you probably already know it: The things we each need to learn in parenting and wholeness are probably not going to be things we enjoy learning about.

I love achievement and making progress with things, and reading and education are huge passions of mine. So it makes sense that to sanctify and mature me, God gave me some children who resist those things to extremes. I needed to learn that my success is wrapped up in my own obedience, and not the progress or growth of my kids. (I am still learning. It’s quite the process.)

And you need to learn things, too. So don’t take it as a personal attack when it seems like behaviors or situations push your buttons in just the right pattern. It is SO hard sometimes, yes. But God trusts us to steward these kids and their needs toward our own growth and sanctification, rather than our own preferences and natural bents.

Because, left to the ease of our own natural bents, we become less and less like Him — curling inward, warped and wilted. He made us, though, to stand strong and overcome.

If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.

1 John 4:12b-13

Last week a friend asked me, “This has been such a hard season, hasn’t it?” and it has been, for so many of us. It hasn’t been the very hardest for me (the first few years post-adoption still make 2020 look like a walk in the park) but it has definitely brought some of the scariest moments and deepest soul seeking for me – questions about who I am and what I’m worth, how God sees me versus how others see me, lies I’ve believed and boundaries I need to put in place.

It is like how when we learn more in any subject, we realize how very little we actually know about it. Our identities are like that. The more broken we get, the more we can heal, and the more brokenness we identify within us that still needs healing.

Don’t misread me — I don’t mean this in the sense of “God loves you very much and He has a miserable plan for your life,” or that we should pursue the kind of brokenness that comes from foolish or sinful choices.

I mean that life is messy, and if we are going to be involved in parenthood, leadership, ministry, or any other significant mission, it will involve brokenness.

So He honors some of us with a lot of brokenness because He knows we will steward it well.

You know, like He did: Beauty for ashes. Joy for mourning. Forgiveness for sin. Because He is making us like Himself, but not everyone surrenders to the process.

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. 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. 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 4:16-19

We have to recognize our junk to be able to start dealing with it, and once we recognize it, we start seeing it everywhere. So if you, like my friend, are asking, “How can I possibly still have this much junk to deal with?” be comforted by the fact that if you are recognizing a lot of it, you are making great progress. We only move toward healing when we’re no longer oblivious to our brokenness.

The further we go in adoption, the more I realize that God called us to it not just for our kids, but for us. Yes, they needed us – they needed homes and healing and protection and a family. But we needed the sanctification. We needed to understand more of His love for us, as we loved them. We needed to see the world deeper and wider, and to understand our own brokenness more fully so we could walk in healing and wholeness.

Because He made us to be overcomers, along with our kids.

For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.

– 1 John 5:4

And look at how far we’ve come, how strong we all are now: The broken things are starting to rebuild along better paths, in us and in our kids. The hard things have become the familiar things. What used to seem impossible is now routine.

The scream of the grass blades assaults our ears like a fighter jet grazing our rooftop, but there we are – no big deal, completely unfazed, just picking weeds out of the garden as He makes us more like Him.
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Related: Don’t Make Me Use My Mom Voice: a 1-hour training for any struggling parent. It was made for adoptive and foster parents, but don’t let that sway you! You’ll feel more equipped in all your parenting and relationships and personal wholeness. There’s validation, relief, and camaraderie here.

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.