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.
I haven’t published a book in two years, but the one I’ve been working on for eleven years is about to release in a month or so. So this of course is not the best time for my computer to give me the blank stare of death.
But as I type this, it’s done that twice in a span 24 hours.
Did I have all my files backed up recently?
Oh, friends…I think we both already know the answer to that.
Fortunately Vince is a computer whiz (not by natural gifting or inclination, but because over the last five years I can’t tell you how many times technology has fritzed out on us) and he was able to restore the whole shebang the first time, which gave me the opportunity to frantically back up all my files. And since I have approximately the same number of files on my computer as my book has words (65,000, but who’s counting), that process took all evening and kept going through most of the night.
So when it crapped out again the next day, he was able to redo it all quickly and the only loss was all of my saved passwords and several hours of desk time. And even that wasn’t a total waste; in lieu of curling up in the fetal position in a corner of my bedroom and hyperventilating, I spent those hours trying not to throw up and instead busied myself with finding all the books I need to cite in my endnotes.
There have been quite a few days this month that have been not the best ones for sitting at the desk trying to write coherently, anyway. Those were days of Big Thoughts about Hard Situations, filled with distraction while I did tiny tasks: messages, emails, copying and pasting documents, busywork. And finally the short work shifts were over, and to my relief, it was time to switch with Vince and go to the kitchen or the yard. The manual tasks of washing eggs, taking care of chickens, and making shepherd’s pie are a much better use of time on these high pressure, overwhelming days.
Earlier this month we had a first-thing-in-the-morning visit to Urgent Care because little boys should not fight over opening the curtain in the morning (strike one) or stand in their windowsill (strike two) and they should definitely not shove each other while standing in said windowsill (strike three). So Kav broke his arm again – same arm, different spot, both bones but not nearly as bad as last time, praise God and pass the ibuprofen – and he is in another cast until early August.
I have been telling people that, in our defense, in 22 years of parenting we have had eight children and no broken bones until this kid. We almost had a perfect record. So close.
Or another example: One day Reagan finally did her math assignment for the first time in two weeks. She knows odds and evens, has sorted them out for years, and even if she forgets (because this is the brain on FAS), the guidelines are written at the top of her page: Even numbers end in 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8. Odd numbers end in 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9.
For two weeks she either ignored the guidelines or blatantly refused to do it, and instead of following the instructions to mark all even numbers with X’s, she randomly marked some or all of them every single day. She knew it was wrong; she knew she was disobeying.
Ironically, she also wants to move onto the next math level. She talks about starting her next book almost every day, and she knows she can’t get to it if she won’t finish the page she’s on, so close to the end of her current book.
And then one morning she finally did it: Perfect Xs on all the even numbers, and only the even numbers. Hallelujah. The next section was easy: Just add simple two-digit numbers. She knows this and usually flies through it. Just in case though, I checked to make sure she knew what to do. Then she went back to the table.
Two minutes later she brought me her book. She had not added anything. Instead, she went back to the odds and evens she had finally finished, crossed out all the odd numbers in addition to the evens she had finally done correctly, effectively undoing her work and thumbing her nose at me. In spite of what she says every day, the clear message was, No, I do not want to do school, I do not want to move on.
So when we are so close to victory and hit a delay, sometimes it’s attack, and sometimes it’s sabotage – we’re afraid of the change that we’ve been begging for, because we don’t really know what to expect from it.
And other times it’s neither. We’re just waiting, and it’s not always easy to tell the difference. We don’t want to fight against God’s timing and rebuke what we think is an attack if it’s really God causing a delay for our good. So we wrestle in this unknowing, and ask Him to take us back to the beginning.
This is where I was a couple weeks ago. I was praying and had no idea what to do about a situation, and I told the Lord that I needed Him to take me back to the very beginning. In desperation, I felt like I didn’t know how to pray, intercede, declare, bind, or assault the enemy; I had tried everything but nothing seemed to be working.
So I asked Him again, through tears and gritted teeth:
“God, show me how to pray. Show me how to declare. I need You to show me exactly what to do now because I don’t know what’s working. I feel like I’m aiming blindly and sometimes something sticks and sometimes it doesn’t, and I don’t know what makes the difference. So show me what to do – show me what works, and show me how to do it. I keep hitting all the buttons, and I don’t know what’s working, what’s not working, what’s canceling the others out. I just keep slamming all the freaking buttons. Show me the right one to push, and I will do it.”
When I was done venting and seething, the Holy Spirit quietly said, Everything works.
I sat there stunned, wondering if I’d heard correctly. What?! What do You mean, everything works?
He answered, You want to know how severe the onslaught has been against you? It’s because everything you’ve been doing in obedience and faith works – and that’s how much opposition you’ve been dealing with, because everything you’ve been doing has been working.
You’ve just been encountering that much attack because that’s how terrified the enemy is of your victory.
And suddenly I was eager to intercede, to fight, to get back in the battle. The enemy had me convinced it wasn’t working and I fell for it. I hadn’t been pushing as hard, which made his job that much easier. But since that revelation, there’s been momentum in prayer and intercession and declaration and in coming against the enemy and binding his attacks because I know it all works.
Trusting even when it appears you have been forsaken; praying when it seems your words are simply entering a vast expanse where no one hears and no voice answers; believing that God’s love is complete and that He is aware of your circumstances, even when your world seems to grind on as if setting its own direction and not caring for life or moving one inch in response to your petitions; desiring only what God’s hands have planned for you; waiting patiently while seemingly starving to death, with your only fear being that your faith might fail – “this is the victory that has overcome the world;” this is genuine faith indeed.
– George MacDonald
Superimposed over all this in what can only be explained by divine coordination, are various out-of-nowhere confirmations and encouragements from friends, readers, and strangers: a text with a timely word, dinner ordered for us from out of state, and messages from people telling us what they see in our family, work, and ministry that we don’t see ourselves because it’s all just too close to see clearly.
Which brings me to what might be the central scripture verse for this new book:
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
So there is definite shifting, winds changing. Pressure and attack colliding with trust and abiding. Hard work colliding with rest. Surrender in one direction and rebuke and binding in the other. In spite of the attacks when we are this close, we have momentum: With every Yes, His kingdom’s coming. Because it all works.
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.
