We walk by faith

I am part of the team that is organizing a retreat coming up in early June.  The theme of the retreat is "We Walk By Faith," and I am so excited to be a part of it.  This is my fourth time being on team for an ACTS retreat, and I have enjoyed it so much each time -- it just gets better and better.  If you ever have the opportunity to go on an ACTS retreat, I would encourage you to do it because it is really wonderful and you will most certainly experience God's love for you in a very special way.  And then be on team, because you will love that too!

It has been so special for me that the theme of the retreat is "We Walk By Faith."  I personally did not select the theme, but when I learned what it was going to be, I couldn't help but smile, knowing that God certainly would teach me a few things with a theme like that!  And of course He has!!

As you can imagine, this whole adoption is an exercise in "walking by faith."  Since the very beginning, it has been God's work.  He was the one that started us doing this.  He is the one that is sustaining us during the process.  He is the one that knows how it will turn out.  We on the other hand are walking by faith.

Lately, I have felt a bit of a nudge to make a bit of a change.  Nothing MAJOR major, but definitely meaningful.  I have been praying about it, and talked to Jerry about it, and he thinks it seems right as well.  We have discussed it with our agency rep, who also thought it was something that we should consider pursuing.  As it stands, it is in God's hands (where else would it be, eh?).  I believe the nudge is coming from God, and I feel peaceful and joyful about it.  And the best part about it is that I am walking by faith.  Maybe nothing will come of it, but if God wants this to happen, it will happen, I have no doubt.  I'm not going to second-guess.  I'm not going to strategize.  I'm not going to come up with a list of pro's and con's or a cost-benefit analysis or even a regret analysis.  Yes, there really is such a thing as a regret analysis.  This is very uncharacteristic for me as it seems like my whole adult life I have been one to make things happen.  If one way doesn't work, I figure out another way.  It is just how I am, and for the work world, it works great.  So it has been a challenge for me in my faith life to "Let go and let God," as they say. To figure out that place where I still do my part but also where I just let Him act through me.  To know when I need to stop moving and shaking and doing, and just be.  I think it will continue to take me a while to re-learn some habits and behaviors, but I am trying.  In this area, as in many others, I am a work in progress, and it is certainly fun to have a front-row seat to see what God will do!

Love in the home, a Mother's Day poem

If I live in a house of spotless beauty with everything in its place,
but have not Love,
I am a housekeeper—not a homemaker.

If I have time for waxing, polishing, and decorative achievements,
but have not Love,
my children learn cleanliness—not godliness.

Love leaves the dust in search of a child’s laugh.

Love smiles at the tiny fingerprints on a newly cleaned window.

Love wipes away the tears before it wipes up the spilled milk.

Love picks up the child before it picks up the toys.

Love is present through the trials.

Love reprimands, reproves, and is responsive.

Love crawls with the baby, walks with the toddler, runs with the child, then stands aside
to let the youth walk into adulthood.

Love is the key that opens salvation’s message to a child’s heart.

Before I became a mother I took glory in my house of perfection. Now I glory in God’s perfection of my child.

As a mother, there is much I must teach my child, but the greatest of all is Love.

Author Unknown

Being 8 is great!

It has been a really funny couple of days since my last post.  I have had literally a zillion friends (ok, ok, not exactly literally) approach me at school drop-off or pick-up or at church or the grocery store or wherever asking how things were going, with that look that says "I really want to ask about how the adoption is going, but don't want to ask if you don't want me to."  So I have had the chance to share that we are #8 on the wait list with all these people!  Everyone has been so super excited that it is making me even more excited!  My head reminds me that it still could be a long way off before we get our referral, but my heart is getting so excited and hopeful that someday soon we will see photos of those beautiful eyes and kissable cheeks and know that these are the children that God has planned for all eternity to be part of our family.  Oh my precious babies, I can't wait to hear that you are mine, my own sweet babies.  I pray that we hear news of you soon!

We are a little bit closer!

I received an updated wait list number today!  The number still needs to be double-checked, but I think it is probably good enough to share, so here it is:

8

To be honest, when I heard it, I was disappointed that it wasn't lower.  I really thought that since the committee had met a couple times since our last update, that we would have a lower number than this, but when I shared the news with a friend of mine, she was so excited!!!  Single digits!  Definite progress!  So happy for us!!!  So, I'm feeling rather convicted at my lack of gratitude.  Yes, it definitely is closer, three steps closer in fact to the very top of the list, and so I am happy for that.  And I remind myself that we don't techically have to be on the very top of the list to receive a referral.  For example, if there are eight or more placements to be made at the next committee meeting, then we are in business!  Or, if there are less than eight but our parameters are wider than the families that are closer to the top, then we are in business!  So when I think of it that way, it is way cool.  We're just that much closer to our little honey pies!

Being honest here, it is just hard to keep waiting, especially as we get closer to Mother's Day.  I remember so vividly the first Mother's Day I celebrated as a mother, not just a daughter, back in 2005.  Mario was just a few weeks old and not home yet.  We had just received his referral the previous month, when he was just a week old.  We were giddy excited about him, and of course wanted him home as soon as possible, but the wait hadn't been so long at that point to taint the good feelings that I had.  I was just purely happy.  I was cantoring at Mass on Mother's Day, and at the end of Mass, the priest asked all the mothers to stand up for a special blessing.  I realized that for the first time I could be one of those standing!  I caught the eye of my friend Gina who was a couple pews away, and the look on her eyes told me that she completely understood how I was feeling as I stood up.  I didn't realize until that moment that he was going to ask the mothers to rise.  He probably did that every year, I was just for some reason caught off guard, so I was feeling a little bit of shock, and the rest absolute joy!!  My eyes were brimming with tears and I could barely keep from bursting out in happy tears.  Loud ugly happy tears that is!  How I ever made it through singing the recessional hymn I couldn't tell you, other than it being the pure grace of God.  There was no full choir; it was just me up there, so definitely it had to be the grace of God to make it possible for me to sing at all.  It is such a beautiful memory to treasure, and I am grateful for it.

So today, even though I have a little bit of wistful sadness that it is unlikely that we will have our referral before Mother's Day this year, I am grateful that we are on this journey at all, and I am trusting the One who is infinitely trustworthy that His perfect plan is being worked out here at home and with our little ones, and that one day, at the perfect time, they will know that I am their mama forever and ever and ever.

It's raining

We have been having a wet spring in our area, and today it is raining again.  It is a beautiful rain, actually, and is falling straight down, so I am able to keep the windows open and listen to it.  I just love the sound of the rain, and it smells so nice and fresh.  There is some thunder in the distance, but I am still able to hear the birds around here, and it feels nice and cool and refreshing.

As I was sitting listening to it, I was thinking about other rainy days over the years, and since I don't have anything adoption-related to blog about (still waiting on that wait list number update), I thought I would share some funny and hopefully interesting rain stories.

I was trying to see if I could recall my first rain memory, but I haven't been able to come up with anything from when I was very little.  I'm absolutely positive it rained when I was a kid, but I am drawing a blank on any early rain memories other than pulling on my big red rain boots and splashing in puddles.  Don't all kids love to splash in puddles?  The earliest actual rain story I can think of was when I was probably in third grade.  Not so young, but it is probably the first rain story in which I got in trouble.  My mom was working outside the home at this point, so when we got off the bus after school, we would go to our babysitter Mrs. Farrah's house until Mom picked us up after work.  Mrs. Farrah lived about a block  from our house, and the bus stop was just across the street from her place.  My sister and I got off the bus along with another boy that Mrs. Farrah watched.  Brian Hastle (like castle) was his name.  I can't believe that I can remember his name, and that he had red hair and freckles, but can't remember a thing I learned in organic chemistry.  There were a few other kids that also stayed at Mrs. Farrah's, but I don't remember them exactly.  Anyway, it was raining pretty hard this particular day, and Brian and I were convinced, you know how convinced you can be of things when you are a kid, that it was raining so hard that Barney the bus driver was going to get in trouble on the rest of his route through our development.  There's another name I can't believe I can recall:  Barney the bus driver.  And it's not like I can even use that bit of information in a trivia contest.  "Name your bus driver when you were in third grade."  Unlikely.  So like I said, Brian and I were convinced that Barney was going to get into an accident or something.  The development was shaped like a pot with a handle, so all he had to do was drive up the handle, go around the pot, and come back down the handle going the other direction, but we were sure something was going to go wrong, so we stood out on the sidewalk in the pouring rain waiting for him to pass by Mrs. Farrah's house.  Here's another logic breakdown:  that a couple third graders are going to be able to somehow help out a grown man driving a bus by standing out in the rain.  Maybe it was our way of showing solidarity, I don't know.  In our favor, we did have umbrellas, so I wasn't like we were getting soaking wet or anything, but looking back, it might have been a tad smarter if we had just waited on her front porch.  Or if we had looked out the window from the inside of her house.  Anyway, there we were, standing in the rain, for about three or four minutes.  Barney comes back, we wave a "Great job Barney!" at him, and head inside, applauding him that he could manage the treacherous job, and applauding ourselves that we were the only ones to witness it.  We didn't count on the fact that we were leading ourselves right into a punishment.  Remember my sister and the other kids, all younger than us, had also got off the bus and had dutifully walked into Mrs. Farrah's house.  So Mrs. Farrah knows exactly how long we were standing out in the rain, and the rule was that we were supposed to walk straight to her house after getting off the bus.  She didn't think much of our argument of protecting the bus driver.  We probably wrote a lot of sentences that day.  So that is my "being silly in the rain can get you in trouble" story.

Freshman year of high school, my family went on vacation to Florida over Christmas break.  We drove down; my mom and her brother Uncle Joe were the only two drivers, and my two sisters and I are in the backseat.  It's a long drive even to get to Florida, and then to get all the way to Key West, our ultimate destination, takes a very long time, so we stopped at Disney for a couple days, and also went to Cape Canaveral (my uncle is big into space; it was cool though).  We were going to camp at Key West, and my mom had borrowed a big tent from someone she worked with.  Big old canvas six or eight person tent.  We arrive in Key West and are so excited because it is even warmer than in Orlando, and the ocean is right there near the camp ground, and everything is beautiful, and everyone is laid-back and friendly.  Then we start to put together the tent.  Keep in mind, this was a borrowed tent.  We had never put it up before; we had never actually seen it put up before, but my mom's colleague had insisted that it was easy, and that we would be able to do it no problem.  Granted, none of us are extremely mechanically-inclined, but we really struggled for quite a while on how to put up the tent.  Finally, a man and his wife approach us.  The wife tells us that her husband had been a Seabee in World War II.  He could probably make us a tent out of loose leaf paper.  We're all much happier.  He rummages through the canvas and the poles for a while, and then asks where the rest of the poles are:  where is the top piece that is shaped like a cross.  Yeah.  We did not have the most important piece of the tent.  The one that would hold everything together.  Whoops.  Luckily, like I said, he was a Seabee, so he ends up fashioning something out of materials he has in his car.  A part from his jack and something else.  Truly amazing because that tent stayed up for five days with no problems at all.  He told us no problem, we could use it the whole time we were there, but he would sure like to have the parts back when he left, which was going to be the same morning we left.  Then in the middle of the night, a few hours before we are supposed to take down the tent and leave, it starts raining.  Pouring.  We wait until it gets slightly light out, and it is still coming down hard.  We're not too excited about the prospect of loading up the car and having to take down the huge tent in the rain, but we knew we would have to so that we could give the man back his jack and other things.  We climb out of the tent, only to discover that they had left already.  I think they just didn't have the heart to ask us to take down the tent in that rain.  Extremely kind of them.  So that's my "rain can bring out the best in people" story.

Here's another rain story, this one from Botswana about two weeks after I had arrived (recall that I was in Peace Corps after I graduated from college).  Back then, Botswana was experiencing a severe drought.  For a country that is mostly agricultural, drought is a very serious situation.  They didn't have equipment like here in the States, those big sprinklers that can water entire fields.  They didn't have agricultural canals either.  They just had rain, and if there isn't rain, you and your crops and your livestock are in trouble.  They did have wells too, which helps with watering livestock, but regardless, drought in a developing country is serious business.  Anyway, we are there one day in a village called Kanye, which was one of our training locations, just sort of hanging out.  Our trainers are all Batswana and a few Americans who were on staff at the Peace Corps office.  And we're talking about the drought.  The Batwana are saying that it hadn't rained in years, and that the drought was very terrible.  After a little while, what do you think:  it starts raining!  And not just a little sprinkle; it starts pouring!  It is coming down in buckets!  Several of us just start dancing and jumping in the rain.  It was so beautiful.  I can remember thinking:  yippee!  The drought is over!!!  We didn't understand at the time that they were speaking with some hyperbole.  It did rain sometimes, just not so much, and not nearly enough for crops or livestock, and the country was truly hurting, but to say that it hadn't rained in years was not exactly factual.  Just a cultural difference really.  Regardless, the rain was beautiful.  The rain was generally like that there:  just these big dumps of rain.  Where we were stationed in the Kgalagadi, flowers would just spring up out of nowhere whenever it would rain.  Just all over the sand.  They must have had some sort of hibernation stage and would wake up at the first sign of rain.  And the salt pans would fill with water.  From a bit of a distance, they would look like deep lakes, but the water was probably only about an inch or so deep.  Still, it was quite a transformation to go from bare sand with only a few acacia trees, to all of a sudden having clumps of grasses and flowers everywhere and even a "lake" or two.  That's my "desert and wasteland will bloom" story.

After I finished my Peace Corps stint, I travelled quite a bit through parts of Africa and Asia.  The travelling was absolutely wonderful, but I did get rather rained on in places because I was there during the rainy season.  Take Nepal, for instance.  I sure knew I wasn't going to climb Everest or anything remotely like that, but I was hoping for some hiking in the Himalayas.  I inquired at several trekking companies, and they said they didn't organize hikes during the rainy season.  I was somewhat ticked off, thinking I don't mind if I get a little wet.  I'll wear a big rain poncho; no big deal.  I'm in Nepal, and it would be a shame not to do some hiking in the Himalayas.  Sounded kind of wimpy to me to not go trekking just because of rain.  I asked a number of other travellers that were staying at the rest house where I was, and they all said the same.  Trekking companies stop trekking during the rainy season.  Then one guy suggested maybe I could find a guide and hire him on the side to lead me on a trek.  That sounded like a good answer to me!  I would just go back to one of the companies and see if I could organize that.  Great idea.  Then the guy said to me, "You understand why they don't trek in the rainy season don't you?"  Honestly, I hadn't given it much thought.  I just assumed there were less travellers then because of the rainy weather so it wouldn't be as cost-effective to lead hikes, and the views wouldn't be as good, and besides it would not be as much fun in all the rain.  He says, well yeah, but also, keep in mind the topography.  The trails are very rough and narrow in some places, and with all the extra rain there could be mudslides.  Hmmm, that sounds a little bit dangerous.  But there must be some way to get around that.  Just be careful and whatever.  Avoid really bad areas.  But I really really wanted to go hiking in the Himalayas.  I was willing to take that risk.  Then he says, "And also, there will be leeches.  In the mud, and falling from the trees." Oh. my. goodness. gracious.  That was the grossest thing imaginable.  I shiver now just thinking about it.  I could do rain.  I could do mud.  Wet feet, wet tent, not a problem.  I could even consider mudslides.  But ain't no way I am having leeches fall on me from the trees!  That was the end of that, and I did not go hiking in the Himalayas!  So that is my "rain can bring out the grossest things" story.

How about our wedding?  It sure rained then!  The second half of the wedding and the first part of the reception it was pouring and thundering and lightning like wild.  Really it was not a problem at all because the reception hall was literally right next to the church, and even people that didn't have umbrellas could just make a dash for it.  My hair was not so great though, and yeah it would have been nice to have great hair on my wedding day of all days, but it just didn't happen that way.  The stylist had made all sorts of long flowing curls all over my head, and in the salon it looked beautiful, but as soon as I stepped outside, the humidity just made them droop.  My sisters did an awesome repair job with a curling iron in the church basement a few minutes before the wedding started, as awesome a job as can be done in a few minutes with a curling iron in a church basement.  That sounds complainy, but really I don't mean to be.  It really didn't matter that much.  The part I prefer to remember was hearing the rain from inside the church during Mass, and our priest remarking that in Ireland, rain is considered blessings falling from heaven.  "With that in mind," he said, "Heaven is sure blessing us today."  I definitely felt that way.  So that is my "rain is a blessing" story.

So those are some hopefully entertaining rain stories from yesteryear.  I'm sure you have some fun rain stories too.  Enjoy the day and your blessings from heaven!