What if I told you I was afraid….yes, I’m afraid.
Ignorance really is bliss during your first adoption. There’s SO much you just didn’t know and you looked at SO many smily, family photos, watched SO many tear inducing YouTube Gotcha day videos. Everything is new and amazing, sweet and lovely. You step forwards in “faith”, but a lot of it is stepping forward blindly because you really have zero idea what it is you’re getting in to.
Similar to being a new parent, there are all of these pre-conceived notions of what your birth, delivery, and basically what parenthood will be like and most of those fantasies are really shiny and pretty.
The reality of it is that when you’re staring at the pregnancy test of your second or third child, there is joy, but it’s laced with a bit of anxiety and fear, and just plain exhaustion…Am I enough? Can I love this child the same as the first? Will there enough of me to go around?
Am I right? It’s different the second time.
I’m feeling the same way with moving forward with this next adoption. I look at Lian, I look back over the last 2 years, and yes, it has been AMAZING, and we’ve learned so much, and have been so blessed, but there’s a weariness and a caution laced with fear that I feel dragging us down, holding us back, anchoring us to this earth.
There’s no shiny happily-ever-after view, it’s now all reality…..in all of its hard and wonderful, broken and healed hallelujahs.
And I’m afraid. The “what ifs” press down upon me like stormy waves. The “Was Lian an anomaly? Was he too easy or was he hard?” “What if Ella is hard, like seriously hard…..harder than Lian?”
And fear whispers in my ear because I allow it to be heard.
BUT……
Nowhere is God involved in fear. 1 John 1:18 talks about how “perfect love casts out fear…” and while the correct context of the verse instructs us to not fear eternal judgement because we have accepted Christ’s perfect love, I believe that the Holy Spirit can also give us a perfect love for others, a love that can ascend past the anchor that is fear.
And so, my prayer for this journey isn’t that we would have a blinded, rosy view again…. it’s that God would give us perfect love for this next little one who needs a home….the one who waits.
God, give me perfect love through the long, exhausting, international trip. Give me perfect love through Ella’s grieving process, through her health issues, the specialists and doctor’s visits. Give us all perfect love to, once again, step forward, accepting the hard with the glorious.
Give me perfect love to climb this mountain again. Cast aside fear because You have no part in that.
Recently, this song by Matt Kearney popped up one day in the car…and the words…struck me….and I listened to it with tears streaming down my face, because every word of it is TRUE.
NEVER BE READY
Talking ’bout flying
Maybe we’re diving in over our heads
Scared of what I’m feeling
Staring at the ceiling
Here tonight
All our best defenses
We’re taking our chances here on the run
The fear is an anchor
Time is a stranger
Love isn’t borrowed
We aren’t promised tomorrow
For the perfect time to come
Hold me steady, we’ll never be ready
When we don’t know, though we can’t see
Just walk on down this road with me
Hold me steady, we’ll never be ready
Here in the silence
With all of the violence crashing around
Saying we can’t go
Saying we don’t know
For the perfect time to come
Hold me steady, we’ll never be ready
When we don’t know, though we can’t see
Just walk on down this road with me
Hold me steady, we’ll never be ready
If fear is an anchor, I don’t want it. I don’t want to be held back from the perfect will of God.
This Eternal Journey 