Getting My Head Straight

Trying, really trying, to sort through the stuff in my head regarding adoption.

We have prayed and prayed, we have asked God for the big arrow, the This Way Please sign, the DO THIS NOW pop-up, but nothing is there.

But nothing is NOT there, if you know what I mean.

A friend of my husband's said, "Just go until God stops you. If it's wrong, God will let you know."

This was interesting to me, in the same way that people landing in a spaceship in my front yard would be interesting. Normally, I do not operate like this. My mother instilled in us this principle: When in doubt, DON'T.  And I have lived by it for pretty much ever.

This morning, the thought occurred to me: what if we're not hearing anything definitive from God because He has already spoken? What if God is tapping his fingers on some heavenly table, saying to himself: "When are they going to get it?"  I know I do this with my kids all the time: I say it and it rolls off them like water off a duck's back. Ten minutes later they ask me the same question again and I roll my eyes and say "Hello?" 

Maybe God is waiting for us to get a clue. Maybe this whole thing is such a gigantic yes, that there's really no need for Him to roll out the red carpet and send us an engraved invitation to get our butts in gear.

Check this:

 ³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
⁴⁴ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
⁴⁵ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
⁴⁶ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” -- Matthew 25: 31-46

And this:

²² Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. ²³ Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror ²⁴ and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. ²⁵ But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do. ²⁶ Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. ²⁷ Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.   -- James 1:22-27

So maybe the blinding clarity has already been provided. Who is supposed to help the orphan crisis?

We are.

There is absolutely no dodging this.  We are the answer. We are the workers. We are the ones called to do something. And that something is not to sit in front of our TVs  watching  Dancing With the Stars. It's to engage with this problem. Engage with it. Not observe it. Not bemoan it. Not shake our heads about it and turn away with a sigh because it is just so big that what can we do? I'll tell you what we can't do. We can't do nothing.

And I don't think our convenience is an excuse. Jesus didn't say, "You fed me when you had extra money," or "you clothed me when you needed to get rid of all the crap in your basement." He didn't say "Fund your 401K first, then see how things look," or "Do what the Bible says as long as it doesn't interfere with your vacation plans."

Would another child be inconvenient? Heck yes; but keep in mind that the three I have are inconvenient on a daily basis. And this troubles them not at all -- they take it as their God-given right  to have needs and demands that totally interrupt my needs and demands.  And they feel not the tiniest iota of guilt when they a) wake us up too early, b) vomit on the furniture (or car upholstery, or carpeting, or whatever), c) have to be taken to Target at 8:30 p.m (right in the middle of Person of Interest) because they forgot about a project requiring a large piece of posterboard, some Model Magic, and a box of toothpicks.  Believe me, I know from inconvenient.

My biggest fear here is being a role-model. I am very, very leery of this because I know what an epic failure I am at most things. I am purely incapable of keeping my house clean, of being consistent with discipline, of remembering to fill out school paperwork. I get tight when I have to check the online banking statement because WHAT IS MY PASSWORD AGAIN? So I am more than a little fearful of having other people watch me parent an adopted kid and think to themselves -- "wow, she sucks at this!" On the other hand, maybe someone watching would think "If she can do it, I certainly can." I cannot abide scrutiny. Maybe I should just get a sign that says, "Let's Agree I'm No Good at This and Move On." I do not want to be the poster family for international adoption. What if I can't represent?

These are the thoughts that I think may be what James means when he says "keep oneself  from being polluted by the world." These are the things that chip away at my resolve, that wake me up at night. The nasty little thoughts that sneak up on you and simmer away in your head -- "You aren't good enough, you haven't got the mojo for this, you will be forever different, it will ruin your family, God will not provide..." and on and on it goes.

My sister once said, "service requires sacrifice." And this strikes me as very true -- if we only do what is convenient and safe, how are we different than anyone else? "Even the pagans..." Really, the money here is the smallest part of the sacrifice: the real sacrifice is time, and love, and support, and all the things you invest in your kids for the rest of your life because they are yours and you are theirs, you are family. Selah.

Engage with it. Engage. When you engage, you step in. You enter the mess. You connect. You cannot observe and connect at the same time. Observation implies -- demands, even -- a degree of distance. I think we are being called to close the gap. What if we were in the thick of the fight? How would that change us? How will it change the battle when we attach an actual human being to the problem? A person we can touch and smell and invite in and promise to love?

Now I have to go breathe into a paper bag because I have made myself lightheaded.

Out of Control

Yesterday's sermon was interesting. Interesting if you like being pinned to a corkboard like a helpless butterfly.

Well, maybe not that bad.

But have you ever sat through a sermon and suddenly recognized yourself? Suddenly realized, right down to the core of your being, that this is me? Have you ever discovered the true meaning of blinding clarity?

I did.

The sermon was on anger. Now, I have heard many sermons on anger. Sermons where the pastor unpacked the whole episode in the temple, the righteous anger of Jesus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera (say that slowly, with a British accent.  Better?) I didn't really think I was going to get much new info. In fact, I was preparing to enter that zen-like state of receptiveness in which  I look attentitive and can even take notes, but in which nothing really "sticks," if you know what I mean. 

I know. I am not all I should be.

But then the pastor started talking and inside -- inside, I started squirming. I had that sort of "get that light out of my eyes!" feeling.  But I hung in there and was given a whole plateful of stuff to chew on. Stuff I am still chewing on 24 hours later. Stuff I may be chewing on for weeks.

I am an angry person. You wouldn't know this if you met me. I don't foam at the mouth or  tear my hair out. I don't throw chairs or purchase assault rifles. But I have this well of frustration in me that can errupt without warning. KABOOM. Mount St. Mom. I have always regarded this in two ways: 1) as a product of my upbringing, having been raised by an angry parent (but also by a non-angry parent) and  2) as a deep-seated and shameful character flaw. And #2 explains #1 -- I had both models and, being weak, tend to lapse toward the bad.

But I have a new insight into this anger deal: what if my anger has to do with my very deep need for control? What if anger is my response to things which are out of control, or even just out of my mental picture of how things should be? What if my anger is an expression of selfishness, of protecting my interests? What if it's an expression of my inability to be on top of every little detail, every eventuality, every possible permutation of every situtation that I may ever be in ever?

Maybe you're laughing and thinking, "Jeez, who wants that much control?"

I do.

Maybe not every day, but basically, yes, I want to manage all the little strings of my life. And the fact that I can't make the actual people and situations in my life match the pictures in my head often makes me feel like I am going to implode. Except that I don't. I EXplode instead. And I make myself nuts, feeling like I am responsible for the WHOLE WORLD AND WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE LISTEN TO ME YOU HORRID ROTTEN PEOPLE?

I am exhausted, playing Atlas. So why, then, can't I just lay it down? Why can't I give it to the One who actually can manage all the details?

Because being out of control, placing that control in someone else's hands, is the scariest thing I can imagine. Even though I know that person loves me and knows me so much better than I even know myself, it is excruciating to contemplate peeling my bent, crabbed fingers away. And yet, can I tell you how much I crave rest? To just lay it down and lay down. To go off duty. To really understand the limits of my role and the all-encompassing role of God in my life.

I feel like I just got a peek into my psyche, but it's the same message: the Christ-life wants to kill the Self-life. KILL IT DEAD. But to step out of the self life is hard --- it wants to live and it's not going down without a fight.

I have a lot of chewing to do.

Sometimes I Don't Want What I Want...

My husband came home for lunch yesterday and we had a lovely hour where we could talk without having to listen for short people torturing each other in the other room. Nobody had to push back from the conversation saying, "Those kids are gonna fry!" No one put her head in her hands and said "Please tell me we are not raising axe murderers. Or republicans."

It was so quiet, we were almost nervous.

After we got the small talk out of the way ("Hey, I lost the dog for 20 minutes today!") we sat down to discuss the whole adoption thing. I have to say, that compared to my expectations of this conversation, it came off a lot better than I had hoped. And let me be clear here, I wasn't hoping for much. In fact, I was dreading whatever answer my husband came up with, because a 'yes' would be profoundly scary and a 'no' would feel like an epic fail.

Instead, my husband started talking about something they discussed in his bible study this week -- namely, whether you're going to choose to live the Christ-life, or the Self-life. Without getting overly complicated, it boils down to this: are we going to choose to depend on God for what we need, or are we going to depend on ourselves? Will we choose a path that allows us to see His blessings, or will we choose a path  that allows us to pat ourselves on the back for being so forward-thinking that we planned for every eventuality thankyouverymuch.  Because when we're busy taking care of all our needs, God is prevented from blessing us the way He wants to. But if we step out in faith, not really knowing how we're going to pull this off, we've set the stage for God to show up big time. And that raises a second point: Do we believe that He will, indeed, show up? Do we believe that He is master of the details, in charge of the outcomes, already ahead of us with whatever we need to accomplish His purposes? How much, really, do we trust Him?

Tim's take on it was this: God already knows what decision we'll make. The decision does not, in fact, affect whether we're saved, but it may represent a choice of either Him or Self.  No matter what we choose, He has already made provision for everything we need. We can continue to live the Self life and we will still go to heaven, but the ultimate goal of the Christ life is to kill the Self life -- KILL IT DEAD. So if we say no, are we saying no because we don't trust God enough, because ultimately we don't believe He can come through in the clinch? Because while he might provide us with the funds to do this thing up front, the long term stuff is beyond Him? This isn't really a case of putting your money where your mouth is, but more of a case of laying your life on the line. Adopting a child is forever and ever, world without end, amen. This is not a one-and-done deal, but rather a relationship that is going to be there for the rest of our lives, both with that child and with the One who may be sending us on this journey.

So, my Spiritual Leader says (and let me just say here that I am forever saying "you need to be the Spiritual Leader" so then when he actually leads I'm all "What? That's how you're leading? Are you sure that's right? Do you reeeeaaaalllllyy know what you're doing? Do it this way...") we need to pray that God makes it clear that this is what he wants. We need to Gideon this thing.  I am not sure how this is to be accomplished, but that's Tim's take on it. And honestly, it would be nice to get some Go-Do-This-Or-Be-Watching-For-The-Lightning-Bolt confirmation.

Can I just say that I have trust issues? I am a huge committment-phobe on many many levels, most of them completely shallow (like furniture -- I can barely bring myself to buy furniture because the prospect of making a decision is very daunting and I do not roll with mistakes well at all. At. All. So instead, I live with half-furnished and even empty rooms, or I live with furniture I hate -- furniture I am actually plotting to kill -- for literally years because making a decision is just too much committment on my part. Life would be great if I could just date my furniture instead of marrying it.). I wasn't always like this, but as I've gotten older, I am frequently overwhelmed with the "if only" complex and its sister, the "what if" complex. As in, "if only we hadn't bought this house, our old neighbors wouldn't have died" (This actually happened, and I still think the two are related. And I am still occasionally blindsided by a lot of guilt about it.) or "what if we buy the car and then something happens to the house and we don't have the money to fix it because we spent it all on the car?"  So this kind of thinking totally paralyzes me like a woodchuck in the middle of the road with a semi bearing down on it. I cannot move for fear of making some sort of unfixable mistake, for fear of being the cause of great misery. Instead, I become the author of great indecision. The Mighty Waffle, as it were.

This whole prospect of laying it on God is completely alien to me. And I have been a Christ follower since I was 12, so quite a long time; I thought I knew how to lay things on Him. But this feels different, like I'm approaching a new level, a different level that I've never quite been to before. Maybe all these years I've been at level C, and God wants me to move up to level B.  Problem is, I want to scope out Level B first so I can see what's up. Then maybe just ease into the whole Level B experience a little bit at a time, like getting into a really cold pool. I am not a plunger, I'm a toes-feet-ankles-calves, etc. girl.

Tim says not to get mired down in details until we make a decision. This is not the time to even entertain thoughts about how we'll tell our families, how we'll put all these kids through college (Lottery!), how we'd even approach the whole adoption process -- this is just the time to ask ourselves which life we're going to live and find a way to "lay out a fleece" so we can see what God wants. Once we know what He wants, He'll have to step up and smooth the way for all the rest of it.

My spiritual leader is leading. I am in awe, and I am a little scared.

Low

I am having another day where I just feel un-moored. Like a boat set adrift. I go through periods like this and I wonder -- what is it about my psychological makeup that predisposes me to sensations like this? I would so like to feel grounded, connected all the time.

It's not exactly depression. In fact, it's definitely not depression. It's just a feeling of ...of I don't know what. Emptiness? That doesn't quite describe it. Drifty-aimless-lack-of-purpose-shaky-oddness. With a dash of I've-lost-my-mojo thrown in for fun and a big spoonful of Nerves just to keep it all interesting.

If this were 100 years ago, I'd just say I had the vapors and go lie down.

And yet, lying down would feel like purgatory. Bleah. What IS it with me? It's not like I have nothing to do. Could it be the let down after the big project I just finished? I mean, as hard a slog as that was, it did give me tremendous focus for about 3 weeks. Focus and a big caffeine hangover.  Now it's gone and there is kind of a vacuum there.  And the change to daylight savings time always makes my brain wonky. So there we have it: a wonky vacuum.

And I wake up praying, "God, I'm such a failure. I have no big job for You, no huge purpose other than to feed my kids and keep my house clean and teach my little Sunday school class. And how often do I fail at those small tasks? A lot. I'm so sorry...so, so sorry."

And so it goes.

How do I just be? How can I just be in Him?  I have always struggled with this. Grace, as a concept, has always been more graspable as an abstract than in practice for me. Always I am looking for the bar, the target, the list of to-dos. I am a master list-executor, with my little pencils and my checkmarks. Show me the little ticky-boxy things and I am all over it. But this isn't a to-do. It's a be. And being is something harder to wrap my head around. The security, the rest, the peace-thing. It's deep.  You know, deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. And I am kind of shallow right now.

Part of my shallow, my lack of "be" right now is that everything frustrates me. Nothing is quite right, everything feels slightly skewed, and I am the only one who can see that the picture is tilted. The only one who hears the wrong notes. And here's what they're telling me -- "there should be MORE here." Something is MISSING. And that does seem to be something about DOING, rather than BEING. And it's certainly not something about having, because more stuff is totally not the answer.

What, God? What am I missing here?

Random Thots

Sometimes in the evening, my brain starts percolating and I have expansive, world-conquering ideas for the following day. I am going to organize, exercise, make firm decisions, shepherd my children with calm fortitude, paint something, clean a lot, and generally emerge as a beacon of strength and git 'er done-ness.

Then I wake up the next morning and all I can do is crawl into a large cup of coffee.

Why? Why does all this resolve, this determination, hit me when there are only 2 hours left in my day? Why doesn't productivity strike at 8 a.m.? Or, heck, 10 a.m.? I could work with 10 a.m.. I could get something done with 10 a.m..

Last night I was bubbling over with plans and ideas and thoughts, today my brain is groping around in a foggy, uncoordinated fashion -- the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there. Out on the edges of my consciousness those late-night thoughts are swirling like some sort of nebula that I can see, but I can't quite pull the details from it -- it's just a pretty swoosh of color and light and little sparkly planet thingies.

Sigh.

Off I go toward my completely half-baked day.

Farm Fresh

The Egg Man is coming.

Hmmm...that sounds a little weird. But the truth is, I get excited when the Egg Man comes because he brings me these:

Thank you to the BBC for the use of this photo. I am not actually in the habit of photographing my eggs, so I had to borrow a pic. But mine look just like this, promise.

Eggs, straight from the farm, straight from some lovely hens that run around outside as God intended, leading happy chicken lives.

 

For a long time now I have felt like the way we do food in this country is a little off. For instance, why is it that I live in a part of the country that is so thick with farms you can't throw a rock without hitting one, yet most of my food is coming from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away?  Even in my urban paradise (about 1/2 a million people, give or take) I can still drive 15 minutes in 3 directions and hit a farm. The fourth direction would take me about 30 minutes before I hit farmland; maybe less. Yet try to track down a local source for, say, grass-fed beef, and you will meet a brick wall.

 

Imagine how happy I was when I found a farmer in my state who delivers to my city every 3 weeks. From him I get my lovely eggs, but also I can get cheese from grass-fed cows, grass-fed beef and lamb, and pastured broilers -- chickens who have been truly free-range, eating all the grasses and bugs and whatever else makes a chicken sublimely happy.

 

Here's what I love about the Egg Man:

• He re-uses my egg cartons. That makes me over the moon happy. Fresh food and less waste.
• My eggs are naturally higher in Omega-3s because the hens eat grass. Fresher and healthier food -- double bonus.
• I am supporting a local farm -- an actual person -- instead of the Industrial Food Conglomerate. I know my farmer is using humane, sustainable methods on a diversified farm. No chemically enhanced mono-cultures here.
• I have a short supply line between my food producer and me, which means a smaller carbon footprint.

Is it a perfect system? Not quite. It's still cheaper for me to buy grass-finished organic beef from Costco that's been trucked in from Oregon and Montana than it is to buy from my local producers -- about $3 per pound less, which is considerable and frustrating. But I am taking my litte victories where I can get them. My fresher, healthier eggs cost the same as organic eggs at Costco which are trucked in from somewhere in Texas (and that is a BIG carbon footprint, kids), and they are actually cheaper than organic, free range eggs at Target by a nice margin. Love that.

So I get yummy food, and I get to feel really virtuous at the same time. Can I get a  Woot?