getting there: a glimpse of post-adoption motherhood, almost nine years later

Posted on by June 24, 2024

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.

getting there: post adoption motherhood, nine years later

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.

This is an excerpt from Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom’s Memoir of Sinking and Sanctification.

Risk the Ocean: An Adoptive Mom's Memoir of Sinking and Sanctification "Vulnerably shares the blood, sweat, and tear that real sacrificial love requires." "Integrity beams up and out of every page."

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.

when you want to live the dream

Posted on by June 12, 2023

The conversation always starts the same way:

“What do you do for a living?”

“Oh, I’m a writer.”

“Wow, what do you write?”

when you want to live the dream: how we get clarity in the longing

Usually at this point I fumble with an awkward answer involving books, newsletters, and snarky posts on social media. But several times I’ve been tempted to finish it like this:

“Actually, nothing. I get a few hundred words in, and then my computer is highjacked with random updates for the next three hours while I ponder a future of providing for my family by selling giant homemade peanut butter cups on the black market.” 

Because we all want to live the dream, but few things go as we expect them to. And it turns out, the dream is a ton of work.

Over the last decade our family went through several life-changing, sometimes devastating transitions. We learned how to live in isolation. We learned to live with the unexpected. We learned how to deal with extreme limitations. We learned how to live without supports that many other families have.

And in the more recent years of owning a business and writing full time, we’ve learned to live with unpredictable (read: sometimes nonexistent) income. We’ve learned how to make routines that work for both of us — and eight kids — as we’ve navigated the difficult dream of doing work and ministry together at home.

Easy?

No way. Not for a single minute.

But it’s been so good. I’m learning again that we can trust Him. We can do new, brave things we never would’ve considered before. 

On a good week, we start by clearing the rubble out of the way: Repenting, searching, asking God about those stuck places and what needs to be removed for Him to flow through again. I feel so inept at this, but He meets us when we recognize our weakness rather than when we pretend expertise.

Friends, every dream has come with more work than I could have imagined, and it takes more dedication than I sometimes think I have. I’ve learned to hold my expectations with an open hand, because without surrendering the dream to God, it becomes an idol – and then a nightmare. If we ask Him to use us, we must also allow Him to move us in ways we could not have expected.

But even still, God wants us to dream. He doesn’t put these things inside us to tease us.

If you find yourself up late at night, thinking of new ideas and new dreams that He’s giving you, and you have no idea what to do with them, write them down and look them straight in the face. You can put them on screen or on paper, but at least give them some tangible words.

And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.

– Habakkuk 2:2

Ask Him if it’s for real, if it’s for now, if it’s for just you, or if it’s for you and some others He’s also talking to. Tell Him He can do what He wants with it. Get gutsy, go all out, and tell Him He can throw you right outside the small margin of comfort zone you might have recently recovered, and pitch you right into His exciting, marvelous, bigger-than-we-could-possibly-come-up-with-on-our-own mission.

But friends, that dream you long for? That calling you’re working toward? That victory you’ve prayed for? You have to choose between it and the comfort zone, because they do not mingle, they take each other’s oxygen, and only one of them finds victory in surrender. 

He is always growing us as far as we are willing to move.

Just because things don’t look the way you expected doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re not perfect at predicting the future (which you’re not meant to be) or controlling outcomes (which you’re not meant to do).

If you are struggling with these transitions, please know that it takes time to settle into routines that work. It takes trial and error, and the error doesn’t mean failure. It means growth. It means you’re getting closer to the solution that puts all the pieces in the right place.

For those of us waiting for a labor to end, and for the promise of fullness to come to fruition: There is a messy beauty to works in progress. And we are all a work in progress.

This season is teaching you to let go of those expectations and trust God. It doesn’t mean you lower your standards; it means you raise your eyes. You are learning to look past this present circumstance to see His vision for you, which is bigger than you imagined.

___________________________________________

This is an excerpt from ABIDE volume three: Clarity in the Longing. You can find it here.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light

Posted on by May 20, 2021

I’m not proud of it, but lately my domestic abilities are extremely…how do I put this? Minimalist. I don’t rearrange furniture, I don’t buy cute décor, I don’t keep up with style blogs. I suffer through necessary cleaning like everyone else. And now that Vince and I both work at home, our oldest kids do most of the cooking.

prayer like clouds: when we notice things in a different light (shannon guerra)

The only household chore I truly enjoy is rearranging books. But thanks to seven kids who never reshelve anything (insert strict librarian scowl here), I get to do it almost daily.

Vin knows I love moving books around and he recently left one of his new books to my disposal. It was light brown, clothbound, and he said I could put it wherever I wanted. So I looked around, pondered, and dragged the piano bench across the library. Then I stacked the new book on a high shelf with some of his other books.

He didn’t notice for a couple of days. Then one morning he found it and protested, announcing “it doesn’t go there.”

“What do you mean, ‘it doesn’t go there?’” I laughed. “You said I could put it wherever I wanted.”

He threw up his hands in exaggerated despair. “I trusted you to respect the book, and you put it way up there! It’s a beautiful copy about the War of 1812. And I didn’t expect you to put it on a stack, sandwiched between a book by Ted Koppel and an old copy of The Silmarillion!”

The nerd is strong with this one. As you can see, he is a closet book rearranger, also.

That was in the morning. By the afternoon we’ve reached the part of the day when I am at my desk to write, and the ideas and motivations are just…poof, gone. I sit and stare. I open and shut files, open and shut my journal. Look at my notes. I rearrange things on my desk, and somehow it’s not any neater after a few minutes of doing so. And I sit and stare some more.

prayer like clouds: shannon guerra

Yet on Sunday night when I was getting ready to take a bath – on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and in a place I don’t have any writing material whatsoever – all sorts of ideas just flooded over me.

The creative thoughts are supposed to come when I’m conveniently in front of my laptop, or at least have a pen and paper handy. But it almost never fails; the creativity flows without effort in the most unexpected places. The expected place requires work, and concentration, and discipline. Which looks like a lot of sitting and staring.

I don’t think it’s Murphy’s Law so much as it is the need for fresh oxygen to stir up new thoughts, creating opportunities to observe and notice new things. Up here in my office, in spite of all the windows, the view doesn’t really change all that much: The desk is a mess. The floor is lined with throw pillows and crates of books and yarn. Usually there’s a few blocks or toys scattered all over. And out the window, trees are trees.

But…not really. It’s spring and the leaves are unfurling outside. The aspens are covered in millions of pale green stars that flash and twinkle in the breeze. Sometimes the sky is classically blue, but on this day it was cloudy and dramatic, steel grey, shot through with shafts of sunlight against chartreuse new leaves. My favorite. Or one of my favorites, at least.

And there, noticing life around me, I have a few sentences to write about. They string together and start to accumulate into something substantial.

That night I drove to Bible study, and prayer came the same way as I sat and stared, driving down the highway. It came out in small phrases, thinking of what we needed for the night: Good conversation. No one feeling awkward or out of place. Everyone to be at ease, comfortable in their own skin. More concerned with encouraging each other than with impressing each other.

Sometimes they were real sentences, and sometimes they were just one-second thought prayers: Safe driving. Peace in hearts. Healing. Truth. Just sentence fragments, because God knows how to fill in the blanks better than I do.

And I wondered about the weight of those instant prayers. Do they really do anything? They feel so effortless, just thoughts directed at God.

I turned off the highway and drove up the hill, noticing the patchy clouds in a grey sky. And His answer was right there: Some clouds are darker and heavier than others, some will drop rain sooner than others, but all carry a measure of water.

They all accumulate, contributing to the provision for those who are thirsty.

And, hey Love – answering prayer has never been about your efforts, anyway.

This is abiding, the thought-life directed Godward. Unpolished, unpretentious, unrehearsed. Our incomplete thoughts at scattered intervals, strung together and brought back to Him in surrender. Some of them are intercessory, filling the cloud for someone else. Others are internal, our own thoughts and concerns and desires, and they condense as Living Water that washes through us, irrigating our hearts, and bringing wholeness.  

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
    and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
    it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
    and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

– Isaiah 55:10-11, ESV

That night in our small group of women, we sat around a long table with steaming tea in paper cups and discussed the book we’re reading together. And we’re learning so much just from the reading, but we go so much farther when we hear each other’s perspectives and questions. We ignite thoughts in each other we didn’t know were there if they hadn’t had the chance to come up in conversation.

We notice more when we put our thoughts in different places. I didn’t know I thought that, until I said it out loud.

I didn’t realize that was true until I typed it out.

On the way home, rain spattered the windshield and rinsed the highway. It soaked the ground, and the leaves will be bigger tomorrow.

I thought trees were trees – that is, until the sky changed color behind them and they shook in the breeze, demanding me to take notice.