10 Years Later...

New Years Eve...the night of one of my most challenging experiences as a wife, and adult for that matter.  It was 10 years ago today that Roger went into emergency surgery for what the doctors thought was appendicitis.  When the doctor came out of surgery, he sat down next to me with a very concerned look and told me that my husband was a very sick man and was lucky to be alive.  He had just done one of the most memorable surgeries of his career.  He explained that Roger's appendix had been wrapped around his intestine and had gangrene.  It had began to kill off part of his intestine.  He had to remove a portion of the damaged intestine but the big concern was the gangrene infection.  He warned me that he would be in ICU and was not out of the woods.  That's the moment I was really faced as an adult with how fast life can change and how meaningless so much of what we focus our life and attention on really is.  I had two very young boys who needed their daddy!
Roger would go on to spend more than a week in the hospital with no progress in his healing.  The doctor scheduled the same surgery for the 10th day because he believed Roger had a bowel blockage caused from the first surgery.  We were beaten down.  Roger was in pain and exhausted from being so miserable for so long.  I was exhausted from worry and running between the hospital and home.  The morning of the 9th day a friend of mine came by the hospital and wanted to take me to lunch.  We went to the hospital cafeteria and I was telling her I just couldn't imagine Roger having the same surgery and starting the whole healing process all over again after all he had already been through. What I didn't know is that while I was gone to lunch, my husband was having a heart to heart talk with the Great Healer.  To hear him describe this moment gives me goosebumps but after this talk,  nearly immediately his bowels began working.   I came back from lunch to see him juggling his IV and gown as he shuffled out of the bathroom in is room.  The smile on his face said it all!  In 8 hours he went from seriously ill, scheduled for major surgery the next morning, to going home! We were home that night and he will tell you it was all because God's healing.  His doctor said he had no medical explanation for his healing and was really surprised that he would not be doing surgery on him again.
Fast forward 10 years later and here I am looking back over this past year, and how our lives drastically changed in nearly an instant once again.  We had a little time to pray, to have some heart to heart talks with God and each other, and consider what we were meant to do.  When the phone call came, we said yes.  What we were really saying yes to was focusing on more than us.  We said yes to the calling on our hearts to offer our love and our family and our home to a child. Eight hours after that phone call we were headed home from the hospital again, this time as a family of five.
These two moments were big moments in our lives as individuals, as a couple, and as a family.  Big things are going to happen in our lives...big good and big bad.  We have a choice in how we handle everything.  We have a choice on if we focus on the pain or if we turn to the One who can relieve the pain.  We have lives that we are living and we have a choice on if we focus on living more FOR ourselves or more THAN ourselves.  What will your focus be in 2016?

Simply Love

People have asked how our adventure is going and while there's not much we can share, I want to share this...When we brought the most precious baby into our home it happened rather fast...like 8 hours. Our heads were spinning a bit but that was okay. We knew a little of what we were getting into.  We knew that it may be for just a little while. We knew "awhile" could mean 2-3 years....then we learned that "awhile" could possibly mean forever.  We knew this would be rollercoaster journey.  One that might test our stamina, our faith, our trust of "the system." We went in with our eyes wide open and very aware of all the risks of grief and heartache.  We also knew it would be a precious, amazing time in our life, and a huge blessing, no matter the length of time.
We are now several months into this journey, and we have found our new normal. Most days are spent living just a normal life as a family of five.  We attend church, family gatherings, have friends over, go out to eat, have movie nights, and lay around the house just being a family, a family of five.  As if this is how our family will always be.  Then there are those days that remind me that we're not just a "normal" family of five.  Family visits, court dates, paperwork, caseworker visits, calls and more paperwork.  Recently, Roger was talking to someone who asked how old our kids are now.  He told them how old the boys are and stopped there...a reminder that we aren't able to share the story of the littlest among us because she's not "ours."  Legally she may not be ours but in our hearts she is just as much ours as our sons are.
Most days there is a great, indescribable peace about where we're headed and what is going to happen in the future.  Then there are those times when the stress of the uncertainty is heavy. It's usually brief but enough to make me feel like my head may explode from holding my breath waiting to see what the outcome of this part of our story...of her story...will be.
Isn't this the case with so many things in our lives? Living with uncertainty.   It can strain our hope, blind our faith and cause us to look to what we can do to control the outcome.  I have found myself mumbling the words, God is Sovereign, over and over again at different moments the last several months.  In my life, my family's life, and in the lives of all the children in foster care He IS sovereign. We see Him in all the details of our story.  God loves us, people!! And that is something we so easily forget and forget to share with others.
I have come to learn and understand that foster care, while extremely complex, is really simple....it is love.  A willingness to jump all in and love without boundaries, just like we are loved.  That's all it really is.  We love.  Everything we do, our willingness to ride this ride through the ups and downs and loopty loops is solely because of our ability to love...and love fiercely.   So we'll just continue living love with our normal family of five, and be inspired daily to look for more ways to simply love others.

A Promise Kept

Tonight I lay here slightly exhausted with lots of thoughts I've felt I need to share for a couple of weeks.  We celebrated our "baby" boy's birthday today and it was a great day.  The last few days I have been reminded repeatedly of what the last eight years of his birthday brought on, which was bittersweet feelings because he was getting older, which meant I was getting older,which meant time for adding another child to our family was slipping away with each passing year.  You see, from the time he was born I felt as though we were meant to have another child...boy or girl didn't matter...just another child.  There just seemed to always be a reason or excuse.  But I'm here to tell you that when it's God's plan, there is no stopping it and no excuse will keep Him from keeping a promise.
The "ideal" time to become a party of five was following a time that we fostered nearly nine years ago.  It was at the end of this six month time of fostering that I was frustrated, exhausted and truly at my wits end.  I was a stay at home mom who was trying my best to handle the challenges of caring for four kids under the age of five...two being our boys.  I experienced my first heart palpitations due to stress during this time.  I'm talking, crazy time in our history.  On top of the struggles of fostering, I knew it was the "prime time" to think about another child of our own but my smart and realistic husband was totally not in agreement. Im not sure I can express the frustration and despair of those days in this post...it would be too long. I went to bed one night and ended up praying diligently for hours, and really just letting God have it for putting me, us, my family in this position.  He put us in the position of being a foster home for family and now it wasn't working out, it was too much but I couldn't give up...but I couldn't keep going.  And then to sacrifice the future of my family for this? God, really?!...That's where my mind and heart was, Really, God?! and then, after several hours, it turned to, I surrender. I surrender this foster situation, I surrender my desire for another child. And with that I drifted off into a deep, emotionally exhausted slumber. Here's where the promise came.  That night I had a dream. In the dream there was a baby in our home, and I knew he/she was ours.  There was a person who's face I couldn't see standing to the side.  I woke with the most profound peace knowing two things: God had control of the foster situation and we would have another child.  I truly felt like He had promised me these two things that night.  Within two days, the foster situation was resolved in the most amazing, "only God" kind of way.  I was ready for Him to keep promise number two!...little did I know then it would be more than a year, or two, or five.

After fostering, Roger and I agreed to give ourselves a year to get our kids, marriage and lives kind of back to "normal." Fostering had brought a lot of tension into our house so I agreed that that was a wise decision.  Nows a good time to say that that fostering time wasn't all bad. I will always remember Roger saying that time of fostering showed him that he could love a child that wasn't biologically his, as his own.  Little did I know then how profound that statement would become years later.  Back to our agreement...This was about the time of our youngest son's third birthday. When his fourth birthday was drawing near, I brought up the idea of another child and Roger was again the wise and realistic husband. I agreed that we should wait and so we continued along with life.  I went back to work, so that was a good excuse to put off an additional bundle of joy.  Then I went back to school for an endorsement and then a masters degree.  At this point our boys were just easier, life was easier and the wise husband wasn't convinced.  But I had hope in a promise that someday, somehow, we would be visited by the stork. 

Fast forward to December 2012, I just wasn't ready to totally give up hope but decided that after I turned 35, I wasn't having any more children. Time was ticking! I had another deep talk with God on the night of Dec. 3rd. I asked for discernment...God, was I mistaken about the dream and promise that I've been holding on to for five years?? Please show me if this hope in a promise is something to keep holding onto.  The next day, I got on Facebook to find that I had a notification that a friend from church had posted on my timeline. Now, Sara is on the praise team I sing with and we are friends but we don't visit weekly and she certainly had no idea what was going on it my heart. This was her post:

Do you have chills?! Reading this after my talk with God the night before gave me chills...and continued hope.  I still was set on no children after 35 years old. Well, life continued and I turned 35 and my hope dimmed.  I was content...or so I told myself.  However, any close friends knew I wasn't opposed to another child.  All the years that had passed was really due to Roger and I not being on the same page and we HAD to be on the same page for this.  We were on the same page, eventually, with building a house and so we did.  We went from four bedrooms to three bedrooms with the intention of someday putting two bedrooms in the basement for the boys when they're older.  This decision to have only three bedrooms on the main floor sealed the deal in my mind that we were done.  No more babies, said my brain.  God promised, said my heart. 

During the week of Christmas 2014, something happened that would shake what little hope my heart was holding onto.  I had an early stage miscarriage, meaning basically before I even knew I was pregnant, I miscarried.  It wasn't easy to accept this. In fact, I have only told a handful of people...actually, some family won't know until now. This wasn't something I wanted to talk about nor do I really want to share it in this post.  However, I feel it's importsnt to share because it was an important moment in our journey to get where we are. You see, my heart was broken...but I chose to cling to a little thread of hope.  I was literally hanging by a thread to God's promise. Even though I didn't understand why we had to go through that loss, I knew three important promises...someday I will hold that child, God is working on my behalf and He loves me beyond measure.  So I trusted and life continued. 

Fast forward to May 2015...I'm not sure how much I can share of how we became foster parents again it but I will share that God obviously orchestrating it.  The day I asked Roger if he was willing to foster a baby, he was all in right off the bat. No hesitation.  We were FINALLY on the same page.  My prayer had always been that when it was time, we would be on the same page. That's I began to have more hope.  Then I prayed that the timing would have to totally work out because I could not handle adding a baby to the mix at the end of the school year.  Guess what? The first day of summer vacation is when we brought her into our home. There are details in this part of the story that make me so excited to share because it screams, God is in control! But I will have to save them for now.  

We are older than I planned (I'm 36!), we have fewer bedrooms, the child isn't biologically ours and she may only be with us for a season....but none of this matter.  What matters is God's timing and plan is more perfect than we could ever imagine.  He restores and He keeps His promises!  The Bible is full of promises....literally thousands of promises that we can declare by faith.  

So here I lay tonight, totally in awe that my heart is full and completely content.  I do not know what the future holds for our foster situation.  I just know that we have another child to care for and love, and THAT is a promise kept.