This is my first post in almost two years. I can't tell you why I stopped writing really. I will say these past couple of years haven't been easy. We adopted Little K, and from pretty much the first week I knew I was in for the hardest haul of my life. Bonding with her has been the hardest thing I've ever done--harder than losing my first baby. Parenting a child who has experienced trauma, who continues to interact with me sometimes in a distant, almost fearful way, still preferring Dave to me every moment, and trying to love them equally to the child that grew in my belly has been...actually I can't even explain it to you, but some of you who have experienced this know. Let me just say this, that "God is love," is not an easy truth. Loving, is not an easy thing. Listening to a sermon today, the pastor said, "When we enter into a relationship, we are risking everything...faith is giving ourselves over to something larger than ourselves, and risking it being wrong." That's my every day. I'm giving myself over to this journey of life and parenting in all this mess, and I'm risking it being wrong. I love this journey, and I hate this journey. I hate that it is so hard. I hate that I mess up EVERY DAMN DAY. But I gotta say, if it wasn't for God, I would have walked away by now. Day two, I would have walked away.
Right now K is playing legos and smiling up at me in her adorable outfit she's wearing today. She has finally gotten used to jeans, and looks so grown up and cute in them! But earlier today, as she was yelling "no no no. I don't want to do church, I hate God" in my face (even though her virtual "church" is playing pictionary and singing and dancing to worship songs and listening to a Bible story), and "Never, I'll never do that" when I asked her to wash her hands, it took everything I had to just to say "It's ok. God loves you even if you don't love Him. Let's just try it out."
1 John 4:7-12 is a powerful statement. This is that passage in The Message version of the Bible:
7-10 My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.
11-12 My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!
Another minister said, "What you promise when you are confirmed (trust in God, and say you want to be a Christian) is that this is the story in which you will wrestle forever." We cannot confuse certainty with faith. Fostering, adopting, loving, marrying, parenting, friending, risking everything every day in everything we do--that is the hard love, that is the TRUE love, of God. GOD IS LOVE.
I don't know if you read all that, but I just wanted you to know. God is in all this mess. Even if you are yelling at him "NO NO NO, I HATE YOU GOD, I DON'T BELIEVE, I WON'T BELIEVE,"today. He still loves you, and He's waiting for you to let Him hold you, and start that journey of wrestling with His story every day.
Maybe I'll try and get on here more often. I'll try and put my failures to one side and write anyway. In all the mess.
