Foster Care: What I Wish I Knew

30 May

Several years have slipped by since I first penned a letter to my younger self concerning foster care. (Read here.) During that six year period, I have had many people in the process of foster care certification ask me what I wish I had known when embarking on this journey.

What do I wish I had known?

I wish that I viewed behavior not as defiance, but as a means to communicate hurt and reactions to trauma that words would not allow. Our experience in both foster care and adoption has been with children three and under thus far. These little people cannot process or communicate the feelings that are ripping their hearts apart or causing them anger and anxiety. In truth, I cannot always put words or awareness to the many emotions and reactions that I have or have had in this process. In fact, I attended a Q & A foster care panel last evening and found myself with tears streaming down my cheeks as the panel approached their seats. They hadn’t even spoken a word! These last six years of foster care and adoption have been emotionally draining; not only the process, but the relearning how to parent children that have faced loss so early in life. Behaviors convey more than defiance.

I wish I read books not required by our foster licensing, but recommended by fellow foster and adoptive parents. Our foster training was a three hour course once a week over 10 weeks. Each week we met and were lectured on the expectations of foster parents as well as some scenarios that we could expect. We completed homework assignments and filled out heaps of paperwork. Sadly, we were not equipped to deal with practical everyday behaviors, only instructed in what not to do. I am sure that some insight was given, but overall we were poorly furnished with processes to ensure meeting our children’s behavioral challenges with meaningful measures. For instance, time outs, punishments, and taking away of toys or favored items does not work with children going through such trauma. Here are a few resources that I am currently finishing up, revisiting, or reading for the first time. (The last book I have not read yet, but comes recommended by fellow foster/adoptive parents.) A little warning, The Connected Child has wonderful step by step guides, however, this book frequently presents the worst case scenario. Please don’t be put off by this as I was! I have attempted to read this book on three occasions because of this, but have recently come to the final chapters and will reference it again as needed. It is a valuable resource!

I wish I paced for a marathon…or two…or three. In fostering a child you are opening the doors of your home and the pages of your calendar for an indefinite amount of time. This process frequently takes longer than you or the state anticipates and much longer than case management projects. Foster care is a commitment to a child or a group of children to love, protect, and advocate for them until reunification or a forever family, even if that is your own, is warranted. There are seldom quick fixes and even when those do arise, your heart has been forever changed and expanded in loving and caring for a fellow image-bearer of God. Foster care is a marathon.

I wish I embraced foster community earlier on. Foster care and adoption waters can feel like uncharted territory and lonely shores if we don’t embrace and seek out fellowship with other foster families and prayer from our friends in the faith. Seek prayer and shoulders to lean on. I know we could not have made it in this journey, nor continue to fight the good fight as well as our fervent attempts, apart from the prayers of our fellow foster/adoptive parents and faithful friends and family. Only the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit know every hurt and hurdle we and our families face, but the Body of Christ provides prayer and provisions when we most need them and often when we least expect them. Don’t go this journey alone. We were made for community.

I wish I knew this was a family affair. When you as a married couple, or a single adult, step out in obedience to welcome a child or teen into your home, you are making this decision for the other children in your home, your extended family, your church body, and your friends. I’ve stated this in a previous post, but our two oldest children have fully embraced the foster and adoptive lifestyle and they are richer for it! It has been painful and confusing at times as they abruptly said good bye to their foster brother of 13 months, or as they watched and waited for our youngest son to transition into our home and then months later be legally adopted. Additionally, as they have watched us endure different trials or legal setbacks in our adoption of our youngest daughter. With each child they have had a front row seat as their mother and father, although I credit Ron handling his emotions far better than myself, strain under the stress of advocating for what is best and patiently trusting the system and the sovereignty of God to work the slow wheels of justice in our court system. We knew this was a family decision, but we could never have anticipated what a great impact our decision would make on the children already given to us by God, our extended family, and our church family.

Finally, I leave you with several fictional, middle grade to young adult books that adequately and artfully portray what may be on inside the hearts and minds of children in foster care while simultaneously providing a picture of outward behaviors. These books will help you step into the shoes of children that may look like a child whose heart and face you have not encountered yet, but who is waiting for you on the other side of your family’s obedience.

*Parent warning: The next two books contain a character (the foster mom) which alludes to a previous homosexual lifestyle. I am not recommending you read these to your children, but rather you read them for your own understanding of how your foster child is processing their feelings and the road to establishing a healthy connection.

This last book contains a foster (pre-adoptive) daughter who has autism. I am a licensed speech-language pathologist who previously specialized in treating children on the Autism Spectrum. I was amazed in reading this fictional account at how accurately the author described the character with autism. At the end of the book, I read that the author is an adoptive dad of a child with autism. If you are considering opening your home to a child with autism, this may be a good read for you. Remember this is a fictional account! Children with autism are as different as children without this condition. Just an interesting book and a fascinating read.

Do you have books to add to this list? What do you wish you had known as a first time foster parent?

Faithfully walk where God leads,

 

 

Purchase my book, Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale, on Amazon.

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Remembering Our First Foster Care Experience

2 May

This week we celebrate the one year anniversary of our youngest son’s adoption day. What an unbelievably arduous and adventurous process that adoption has been for our family…and we are not done yet! But nearly, praise the Lord, we are nearly made one in name, number, and wholeness as this coming Monday we will receive the adoption case manager for our youngest daughter.

However, today I am reminded of where our adoption journey began as we received our first foster son six years ago. I think back on how naïve we were. How ready we felt to change the world little knowing how very much our world would change. To celebrate National Foster Care Awareness Month I have rounded up all my previous posts, posts dating back to 2012 when we were first foster licensed, and conveniently placed them here for you.

I can scarcely remember the family of four we were prior to this grand journey our family embarked on half a dozen years ago. Our two oldest children’s lives have been forever impacted in both good and challenging, but primarily positive ways, due to our choice to foster and adopt. They have known a mom and dad under more stress than they would have had we not invited beautiful children and the state into our home to share it as our own. As you will see in these posts, they were babies themselves, four and two years of age, when we began. Our children came to know Christ in these years. They converted from not only our son and daughter but moreover to our sister and brother in Christ, and they have indeed born their crosses beside us and brandished shield and sword to fight on behalf of the fatherless turned family. I am so grateful for their stance beside their father and me. I can’t wait for you to walk down memory lane with us. May it be a hall of calling for some to join us as you pass our pictures and posts here.

Would you do me a favor? If you know someone or a community of people embarking on their foster journey, would you share this post with them? I think they will find a friend and a familiar narrative to the ones playing out in their minds as they begin journeys of their own.

So take a trip down memory lane with me as you read these posts and follow a mom’s raw and authentic heart’s cry of can we do this, give me eyes to see as you see Lord, and concluding thoughts that changing the world for one child is worth everything. 

Tomorrow’s Race (here)

Pour Another Cup (here)

Simple Addition (here)

Lessons for Everyday (here)

Lord Give Me Eyes to See (here)

I Must Remember This (here)

Confessions of  A First-Time Foster Mom (here)

Seven Books That Encouraged Me Along Our Journey (here)

 

 

You can now purchase my book, Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale, on Amazon.

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Will More Over Meager Make for Better?

9 Mar

Many people desire and pray for rapid growth, for example when launching a new church, starting a new business, publishing a book, or starting an Etsy shop. Few people know how to manage rapid growth well. We pray for it, and may even anticipate rapid growth, but how do you really prepare for the unknown?

I’ve read of pastors who didn’t know how to handle rapid growth in their church. We’ve all seen the downward spiral of professional performers or athletes because they couldn’t handle the responsibility that comes with wealth and acclaim. Few people can handle affluence of power, prestige, or their pocketbook well.

I’m wrestling with some questions right now that arise after a period of rapid growth in our family. Three years in the process of adoption, not to mention transitioning from parenting two children to four children in a span of three months, rapid growth occurred unexpected, all be it, blessedly. One side effect of rapid growth in our family is the rapid decrease of space in our home. For months now we have wrestled with the idea of purchasing a home with a bit more space: garage, fenced in backyard, maybe an extra room. We already live minimally because we own a 1200 square foot villa with no garage. There just isn’t room for storing extra material possessions. I am constantly, out of both desire and necessity, paring down our toys, wardrobes, and household items.

As we have wrestled and prayed over purchasing a home with more living space. I have asked myself whether I really need more space to live a more fulfilled life; to function optimally as a home educating mom. I know I can make our space work, but do I need to? Wouldn’t I save myself sanity and effort with the addition of a fenced in backyard? Or would I find that in acquiring more, would it even make a postive difference in the long term?

For my husband and I, we know and have witnessed how the rest of the world’s poorest people live. We know that there are people in South America who spend their entire lives living on a trash dump in Honduras. We know that many people in African villages live in huts and serve what they have with a smile and immense hospitality towards those who enter their home. They make much of their meager offerings.  

Even this week in reading, Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful, I am reminded that much doesn’t mean abundance of life, rather gratefully receiving all that God offers of Himself means life lived abundantly. Did you catch that? More doesn’t mean fullness. We can find fullness of joy in the small and incomplete often better than the full and overflowing portions of life.

As a side note, and this will be an entire post someday, read this quote from Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful: (the girls) seemed oblivious to the idea that some people might weigh the joy of loving someone against the pain of potential loss. In regard to foster care I hear this all the time as an excuse not to foster children. Read this book if you are prayerfully considering foster care or adoption.

So I guess what I would love to know is this, have you found that getting what you think you want makes you happier in the long run? Has a larger space, bigger office, promotion or fresh start met the needs you thought they would? I know that we can be content in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. I know that. But how do we know when bigger becomes better and moving on leads to the more God wants for us? How do we know when we have a holy discontent that needs our attention and not the Land of Plenty’s (and plenty of people in the church) constant messaging that more is what we need and should go after?

These are the questions I am wrestling with today. Because when I look at people who have bigger and more I don’t see an overabundance of evidence that it makes a difference in their daily lives for the better. There are always things we as parents and individuals will be anxious over that goes beyond square feet and wide-open spaces for our children to play in.

It’s your turn. Tell me your experiences with making much of more or meager. When you felt freedom to go after the more did it lead to the better? I truly need to hear them.

 

 

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Five Ways I Make Time to Read

21 Feb

People, especially fellow moms, often ask me how I find time to read. In fact, I’ve been asked a few times this week.

That’s an interesting question. When do I read exactly? I have to stop and think about the question because, frankly, I feel my day isn’t complete if I don’t read for at least twenty minutes or more. It may seem silly that I don’t have a set routine I adhere to, or maybe crazier still that I am unaware of such a routine.

So, after some head scratching, here are five ways that I make time to read each day amidst meeting needs of home and family and homeeducating our children.

  1. Read in 10-20 minute spurts. I grab moments to read any chance I get. I know reading fills my emotional and mental tank, so I give myself permission to read here and there throughout the day: while the kids are playing or working on independent tasks, frequently for a few minutes just after dinner, and certainly after the kids go to bed for the evening.  Another wonderful way to do this is by listening to audiobooks. Two audio books I have listened to this year are Wonder and Pictures of Hollis Woods. I read these while exercising, folding laundry, and anytime I was driving solo.
  2. Read with a purpose. Once I started compiling the Orphan Adoption Book List, I was reading with a purpose. The list really focused my selections. Now I am working on a few more booklists and once again it helps me read with intention and drive. Additionally, once I discover an author that I enjoy, I read as many of his or her books as I can find. This year’s author is Wendell Berry. I fell in love with Jayber Crow of the Port William Membership and followed the book with Hannah Coulter, also set in Port William, Kentucky.
  3. Put down the cell phone. Perhaps the greatest distraction from daily reading for me is social media. Particularly Instagram and, less so, Facebook. I typically waste the first precious moments of reading time catching up on my IG feed. I find that putting the phone away affords me much more time for reading. I don’t mind my kids finding me with my nose in a book near as much as my face in a cell phone. Believe me, they see me doing both regularly.
  4. Give everyone a daily break. Ah naptime, you are my favorite! While two of our four children are too old for naptime, we continue to adhere to a quiet break each day. Typically for an hour or so all children will be in their rooms for either nap or an activity of their choice. Most of the time the kids use their quiet hour for listening to audiobooks or reading to themselves. While the kids are in their rooms I read for at least 20 minutes. It is my experience that housework will wait.
  5. Take a book and leave a book. I grab whatever book I am reading and throw it in my purse as we head out the door. This way if there is a snippet of time I am prepared to read instead of scroll (see number 3 above). Also, I leave a few books in my car, in so doing I am not caught without a book to read. That is how I came to read Miracles on Maple Hill (*highly recommended). I had left my current read at home before leaving for my daughter’s dance class. Luckily, I had this gem of a book in the car to read while waiting on her to finish.

With these five methods of increasing my reading time I have already read 11 books this year! I am listing what I have read so far. Maybe you will find one or two books to add to your night stand or keep in your car. (Click here if reading in a browser.)

It’s your turn, how do you make time for reading?

 

 

Pre-Order My New Children’s Book on Adoption on Kickstarter

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Kickstarter Update: We Did It!

5 Feb

The entire Cooney Family would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the overwhelming support and encouragement that we received on our Thirty Balloons Kickstarter Campaign. In less than four days you enabled us to meet our goal! Way to go!

We will share news with you later this week about our stretch goals, but, for today, we celebrate! If you haven’t had a chance to preorder your physical copy of the book there is still time left. Our campaign runs until March 3rd, so please keep spreading the word. We want to share the message of adoption, hope, family, and reading aloud to children with as many people as possible. You can do that by sharing this link.

Thanks so much again,


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A New Book to Carry With You

26 Jan

Sometimes I marvel which childhood bents will carry over to adulthood. For me, the love of a good book is probably foremost. So much so, that I remember on one occasion alphabetizing my home library. I must have been in third or fourth grade. Perhaps I also instituted a check-out operation, though for whom I cannot say.

The first book that clicked with me I checked out from my school library in the third grade. The name of the text has long eluded me. For years I looked in the same corner of the little school library for the book with the girl and the wagon wheel on the front only to be evaded. It is of little importance what the book was, or even its content. What matters is that the love of reading and learning was unlocked.

From that point on,  I was found digging through treasure troves of books. The hardcover, yellow-paged volumes were my favorite. Black Beauty (Dover Children’s Evergreen Classics), Little Women (Puffin in Bloom), The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew, Book 1), and Old Yeller (Perennial Classics) soon became reading companions which still hold honored places on my shelves.

Then there are those books, purchased brand new especially for, or by, me. Books like Charlotte’s Web, Where the Red Fern Grows, A Little Princess (Puffin in Bloom), Matilda, and The Little House (9 Volumes Set). What memories I have of transforming new books into old friends! The sight, smell, and touch of them take me back to the age and place I was when I first read them and they became a forever part of me.

Today, our home library exceeds the shelf space allotted. Now, as then, I continue to find searching for classic and modern volumes therapeutic.

Many childish ways I left behind, but the books I carried with me.

The books we read to our children and the books they find as faithful friends, read and reread as yearly rhythms, they will carry with them long after they themselves can be carried.

Today, I want to encourage you to add a new volume to your shelf.  A new book to turn into worn pages, and its contents into an old friend.

I have written a children’s picture book, illustrated by my oldest daughter, Emily, about our adoption journey of our youngest son. From our first meeting, through the months and months of holding onto hope and seeking his adoption, this story will encourage and inspire you as you wait on the happy endings in your own life.

Many of you have read posts over the years concerning our adoption and foster care journey. Now, you can read our adoption tale to the children in your life that will leave them inspired, asking questions, and perhaps ready to slay a few dragons of their own that stand in the way of them attaining their God-given dream. I hope you will!

I believe that real books read on the laps of parents and with loved ones are the best tools to introduce and reaffirm the magic of story and strengthen family bonds. That’s why I am excited that you can purchase your own copy of Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale on Amazon. I am also offering a free pdf download for those who pop their email into the box below! I pray it is a book you will want to carry with you. Go ahead and download your copy now! Then head over to Amazon to order a copy of Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale to read with your family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Seven Books that Encouraged Me Along Our Adoption Journey

19 Jan

I’ve written a good deal about my booklist that highlights orphans and celebrates adoption. It all started long ago when as a young girl, I knew I wanted to adopt. My hands reach out for books daily, whether at home, the library, a used bookstore, or while looking at the bookshelves of every home I visit. It never fails to surprise me the number of books that pass my hands where the protagonist is an orphan or an adopted child.

I didn’t initially set out to make a list of books about orphans, but I recognized that over many years my pile of books with orphan and adoption themes grew. Then I considered it might be a wonderful way to encourage and inspire others who want to adopt, are adopted, or those who genuinely enjoy a good book in general. So the orphan/adoption booklist was born.

Today, I want to give you seven specific books that encouraged me along our adoption journeys: one completed and one yet to be completed. These are books which can be read aloud to your family or independently by you or your child. They are the books which encouraged us to start this journey, stay the course, and find our voice reflected articulately on a printed page. (*All links are affiliate links.)

The book that encouraged us to venture into foster waters when adoption was our end goal was Kisses from Katie. The author, Katie Davis Majors, was a recent high school graduate when she decided to move to Uganda for a year of mission work. Before the year was over, it was obvious to her that she would be staying much longer, indefinitely in fact, as she began the process of foster care and adoption of 13 Ugandan girls. Hers is a story of inspiration and hope.

Another book that prompted perserverance was Eric Metaxas’ book on William Wilberforce. Wilberforce labored over 20 years to bring about the abolition of the slave trade in the British Colonies. His is a testament of tenacity and a story that will keep you putting one foot in front of the other moving in the direction of your destiny. 

Next, Dr. Russell Moore’s book, Adopted for Life, was such an articulate read that really put into words many of the thoughts I hold on adoption and helped me to consider how we will talk about our blended family unit at present and in the future.

Two picture books that captured my heart and provided encouragement and beauty for our whole family are:

Two chapter books which encouraged me and are great read alouds for the entire family are:

 

Perhaps, or most likely, certainly, because books have been such a huge influence on my life, I have chosen to share our youngest son’s adoption story in a picture book format. I cannot wait to share it with you! You can now purchase my book, Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale, on Amazon.

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Looking Back On Our Adoption Journey

17 Jan

John 1224

I know you will remember a time in your childhood when you wondered if you were adopted. Never mind that you look like your parents and laugh at your own jokes exactly like they both do; but, just the same, you will wonder if you were adopted and never told. You will naturally gravitate towards books about orphans.

This is the planting of a seed.

Next, you will have a desire to adopt. You will make this a topic of priority with your fiancé and subsequent husband. Being the Type A planner that you are, even a few months into trying to start a family, you will again give adoption consideration and state, “If we can’t conceive on our own we will adopt.”

This is the watering of a dream.

Two kids, and a few years later, you will read Kisses from Katie and determine that if a twenty-something woman from Tennessee can adopt and foster children on her own in a foreign country, then surely you can foster one child on the way to adoption.

This is sunlight upon fertile soil.

Next you will complete the nearly 10 months of work that it takes to train and paper-approve families to foster. It will be a never ending cycle to prove your family fit to parent a child not your own. You will complain and you will wonder why on earth it will take so much to do a good deed.

This is the breaking forth of a seed out of the dark soil into the sun. 

At last, when you thought the day would never come, you will get the call to pick up your foster son. You will go expectantly with his Thomas the Train backpack and snuggle animal from Target. Then you will meet a child who your heart will forever call son. He will be blonde and beautiful and wild and covered in spaghetti sauce and you will have many long days ahead of you.

This will be the stalk rising from the ground.

For 13 months you will labor, love, and advocate on this child’s behalf. You will sing to him, Jesus Loves Me, and do all the things a mother does. You will watch every single person around you love this little boy like he was your very own son—because in many ways he forever will be your son. You will train him in the way that he should go and pray on his behalf.

This will be the wheat ripe for harvest.  

Finally, at the end of 13 months, you will say good-bye to your little boy as he is reunited with his biological family. It will be one of the hardest and perhaps the most impactful goodbyes you will ever say.

This will be the kernel falling to the ground. 

Months will pass, tears will fall, a new normal will encompass your days, and you will wonder how you ever did it all. You will wonder: can I ever do that again? The answer will not come right away–it will take some years of dormancy and rest; followed by surprises of not one, but two more children through adoption. But in all the waiting, you will say: Loving another child changed my life—maybe the world in some small way. Then you will tell his story…their stories…your story, so that other families may open their homes to make the difference in the life of a child.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

John 12:24

Stay tuned as our Kickstarter campaign commences on February 1st. Our goal is to print 100 copies for distribution of my first children’s book on adoption, Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale. You won’t want to miss a post! So go ahead and sign up to receive email updates. I’d love for you to join our community.

 

(post originally published 2014)

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Filed Under: Adoption, Books, Faith, Family, Foster Care, My Story, Pro-life

Lasting Lessons from Hurricane Irma

1 Oct

I took one last look at my husband as my four children and I drove away from our home on Florida’s west coast. With his hands clasped in a prayerful pose and nervously lifted to his lips, I darted another quick prayer that we would be home again soon and find everything and everyone as we left them. I knew Ron and our family were anxious about my 500-mile evacuation to my parent’s home in Alabama. The last time I had set out on the solo parent mission was six years earlier. We didn’t make it even two hours into our journey when I  totaled our SUV and landed myself and two older children in the ER. That trip was an attempt to help victims of a devastating tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This trip was an endeavor to escape the potentially fatal winds of the category five storm dubbed, Irma.

Irma was the largest recorded hurricane to date. Our city, thankfully, was sparred the brunt of the winds and the storm surge, but not before wrecking everyone in the state’s nerves as we braced to see what path this storm would take and how strong she would come in. Irma resulted in the largest mass exodus of people from Florida. We were among millions driving away from the storm to seek refuge in neighboring states. With gasoline scarce and roadways pregnant with fleeing evacuees, we drove out early on Wednesday morning trying to beat the traffic. We were successful in that endeavor. Finding US 19 traffic free and momentarily plentiful with gas, the kids and I successfully made the 10-hour trip in 11 hours.

As the state of Florida experienced one of the slowest weeks in history, all Floridians felt the oppressive weight of uncertainty. Regardless of our geographic location, we were all considering the possible loss of life and property. We were reevaluating priorities and esteeming relationships above material possessions. So many of us wrestled with the question of evacuating or staying to assist in the aftermath. Hunkering down, or hustling away. Many for the first time realized that the cone of uncertainty is a real threat and not an ideology to keep people glued to their local weather forecaster nor a way to sell bread and water.

Now, nearing a month after Irma, there are a few lessons we must remember even as the debris continues to be cleared away and the aftermath begin to look more like the prior glory of central and southern Florida. Granted, our area was spared the most it could have been and the more southern portions of the state are still experiencing aftermath in ways that I cannot fathom at this point. Please consider as you read these thoughts that our home suffered no damage and we weren’t left to wrestle with the total ruin that some of our fellow statesmen, along with the Caribbean Islands, are dealing with. Prior to landfall, we prepared for the worst and prayed for the best.

  1. Community continues to be the cornerstone of civilization. It was amazing to see how much humanity is highlighted in the darkest hours. The community among friends and family was fully displayed as texts were sent, storm shutters and plywood boarded, water shared, and safety plans made. It was a beautiful sight to behold. We held each other’s hands both figuratively and literally, encouraged one another, and prayed for and with one another. We braced the storm with faith in our God and His sovereignty no matter the ultimate outcome. In today’s digital era, we can falsely believe that all you need is a deserted island, Amazon Prime, and a laptop to experience all life has to offer. Rest assured, physical community cannot be replaced, merely inadequately replicated online.
  2. Debris remains long after the headlines have shifted. We continue to require cleanup locally. Most people have cleaned their yards, but piles of brown limbs and leaves accumulated on streets, as well as many large downed trees, remain. News is purposed to sensationalize every situation for a season, but the seasons for real catastrophes linger dramatically longer than the seasons of national news headlines. When our Facebook temporary profile pictures move onto the next cause, people in affected communities cannot. Like a death in the family, the world moves on, but the day to day has forever changed for the family who lost a loved one; and in the case of Irma, loss of physical needs. Therefore, our eternal perspective and our service perspective are longer term than our television screens.
  3. We are smaller and more helpless than we daily imagine. When a category five hurricane is ripping through islands and countries and seems to never slow down, it is amazing to see how big God is and how small we are. Only God can calm the storms. Man can simply brace or run. We taunt our pride in self-sufficiency, only to find in the face of natural disaster we are ultimately inadequate. We can plan, pray, prepare, and protect to the best of our abilities but the outcome is out of our hands. We are in control of far less than we daily realize.
  4. We, the Church, are known by our love for one another. Local teams of people from our church were out immediately after Irma hit, cleaning up debris and fallen trees in neighborhoods. This service of sawing and cleaning up trees cost a reported $6,000 after the hurricane. When a neighbor of one of our church members realized the team at his neighboring home was a volunteer clean up team, his mind was blown! These teams helped people both locally, and some continue to assist further south in Naples. When we help others, Christ is glorified and people begin to question the reason for the assistance being offered.
  5. The objects of earthly importance are not those which we use daily. When we crammed our car full of items we wanted to spare in the event of total devastation, we took documents and photo albums we rarely consider or use. More importantly, we placed the people we care most about in the car to carry them to safety. Things can be replaced. Little we use in the day to day is so priceless it can’t be duplicated or done away with. Irma made us consider how little we really need and how valuable people are.

Ten days after we pulled out of our driveway, we were pulling back into our parking spot. The kids and I were probably among some of the last in our area to make the return trip. We had waited to make sure there was power, gas, and open roadways. This time, as I looked through the window of the car, Ron was wearing a smile and open arms. Hands of prayer had turned to hands of welcoming praise. I hope these lasting lessons linger longer than the headlines in our state and local communities and we place the most value where eternal worth lies.

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Filed Under: Faith, Family, My Story, When You're a Wreck

Thirty Balloons: An Adoption Tale

3 May

Once upon a time, there was a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby boy in need of a place to call home. He needed a mom, a dad, and a few siblings to grow alongside.

A few miles away was a family looking for a child to love forever. The family had a mom and a dad and two children searching for a child to coddle, wrestle, chase, kiss, and teach about the love of the King.

One day, after several months of seeking out such a child, the blonde-headed, blue-eyed baby bounced into their place of worship. He was safely held, that is,  in the arms of a family caring for him until such a time as he was matched with his forever family. For the daddy of the family in search of a baby, it was apprehensive love at first sight. For the mommy, it was a bit of confusion because she thought they were called to love a brown-haired, brown-eyed baby girl. More about her later as she wouldn’t come along for another year…but that would be getting ahead in the story.  After one visit with the baby boy in her home, the mommy, also, was forever in love with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby boy.

In fairy tales, evil always ensues before the damsel is rescued, the family reunited, or the kingdom saved. Real life mimics fairy tales because fairy tales mimic real life. This little boy’s story had many a dark and looming cloud.

For nine months the boy and the family grew to know and love one another. They shared firsts and celebrated milestones. The mommy and daddy, and the boy’s temporary family, sent e-mails, made phone calls, attended meetings, and petitioned judges before the blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy bounced into the family’s home to stay. (Only modern day stories include phone calls and emails, but they are no less valiant, mind you, than decrees and messengers riding through the night to save the kingdom, rescue the damsel, or reunite the family.)

All throughout these months, and the ones which would ensue, a host of people within the Kingdom began to pray and petition the King for the boy to be placed with this family. Countless men, women, and children throughout the land would ask the King to place the boy with the family forever, and, quickly! The petitions of the people were being heard and would be answered in time.

Shortly after the boy came to live with his soon-to-be family, the court discovered an error that had to be addressed for this story to turn a final page into the second portion of its tale. This error would take ten more months to come to light and, thereafter, be rectified.

All this time, the months were accumulating  while the boy was waiting for the royal proclamation to give him a family. It would be thirty months until the proclamation would be granted. Thirty months before the blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy would be given his royal name–that name which his family prays is already written in the scrolls of the Kingdom as in this kingdom. Thirty months until…forever.

Thirty months came and went before this big day arrived…

As the boy and his family experienced the declaring of the proclamation that would unite them for all of their life in this kingdom, they thought of how quickly the thirty months passed in retrospect. Like thirty balloons being lifted to the sky and released in a moment’s time with the wave of a hand, the loosing of a grip, the relinquishing of power.

The weight of the wait was intense and a load, at times, seemingly unbearable. But upon the royal decree, the weight instantly became as light as air. All the cares of the past were lifted away to be replaced by a focus on the future and on raising a knight for the Kingdom.

Lest you forget, fairy tales are full of woe before wonder, and this fairy tale will be like the others and, similarly, unlike. Good days and gloomy days lurk ahead, but this day was a day two kingdoms celebrated with thirty balloons and triumphant shouts filling the chasm between. Maybe, just maybe, one of those balloons reached the other side and greeted others who have waited in like fashion.

*This story is a prologue to another story still unfolding. If it weren’t for this one, the later would never be possible. Woe lurks, but wonder is on the other side. The Kingdom prays and the King whispers, Courage dear heart.


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