Laid Bare

This is our current update. However, if you should read God is.. before you read this blog post. 

Five years ago, my world was laid bare. It was demolished, cleared, leveled and ready to be rebuilt. Because five years and fifteen days ago, my world looked like this: 

My car in front of my dorm room, where my roommates and I were when the tornado hit. 

I was in the Jelks building the night of the tornado. 

Some of you know the story of the tornado, but many of you now following our adoption journey may not. I was a sophomore in college when a EF-4 tornado hit our campus and destroyed many of the residential buildings where students' lived, including my own. The Lord's hand was truly on our campus that night as every single life was spared to the amazement of many.

Surviving the February 5th tornado and the weeks and months that followed were some of the most challenging in my life, that is until two months ago. Like the tornado, I wish I could explain why things have happened with this adoption. I have wondered if we missed where the Lord was leading us. I have questioned if we did something wrong. I have begged God for a reason why this has happened and pleaded for a miracle. 

And I dont have an answer as to why. But this I know: the same God who was faithful in a physical storm five years ago is faithful in the midst of this current storm. Two weeks ago we had a five year Service of Remembrance and one of my former classmates spoke. Danny referenced John 9:3 in which the disciples asked Jesus who had sinned to make a man blind and Jesus responded, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him." 

I pray that the works of God will be displayed through our journey. In so many ways this adoption journey has paralleled the tornado. In the fifteen days after the tornado, heavy equipment was brought in and the bulldozers cleared away the rubble. The land was leveled and flattened and then the rebuilding began. Five years ago, so many people watched the Lord work. It was evident that we were experiencing something that only the Lord could do. It was nothing that any student, faculty member, or administrator could do in his or her own strength. 

I don't know what the Lord is going to do in the future, but I feel that my heart has been laid bare. The past few weeks have stripped me. My desire to have a child and my plans to bring Josiah home have been stripped away. We are broken and humbled by what the Lord has done and is doing. I have no idea what the Lord will do in the future--whether we will bring Josiah home or whether the Lord has another plan for other children or whether He has a plan for something that I cannot even imagine. But I know that my God knows.

I have clung to Josh Wilson's song Carry Me over the past few weeks and one line of the chorus says: 

"Carry me, carry me, carry me now
From my sinking sand to Your solid ground"

For us and many others in our community, our ground has become a sinking sand. Life in this sinful world is hard and painful and is easily rocked. It doesn't make sense to our human minds. But our God is solid, constant, faithful, and good. 

God is...

This is a blog post that I wrote in January, but I have struggled to post. But here it is and it is the back story to where we are today. 

God is sovereign. God is faithful. God is good.

We knew this adoption journey was going to be a roller coaster. We knew it is was going to be hard and painful. But I don't think we ever expected this. The past month has been full of ups and downs. We have gotten good news and devastating news, great news and just ok news and for the most part it is different each day. 

On Tuesday, the Russ*an Supreme Court made their ruling on the adoption ban and they are allowing all of the families with a court decree to bring their children home (we are not one of these families). We give thanks to God for His mighty works of allowing families that have court decrees the opportunity to bring their children home. This is a major answer to prayer as some 50 families are now starting to exit the country with their child in hand. We know that this is truly the hand of the Lord at work!  

After our conversations with the State Department Tuesday and our agency Wednesday and even more news reports coming out of Russ*a today, we are less hopeful than ever that we will be able to bring Josiah home. The Russ*an government continues to attack adoption and places these children, our children, in the middle of a political battle that has been raging between the two countries since before we were born. At this point, they are not making any movement to the middle to allow those of us who have met our children and signed paperwork to be able to complete their process. With the ruling from the Russ*an Supreme Court, with no discussion of families like ours, it is almost certain that our process has now ended, for now.

 God is sovereign. God is faithful. God is good.

I say these three sentences over and over again throughout the day. I so wish that we had a reason for why this is happening. I wish I could see the big picture and understand how this act of spiritual warfare and the suffering we are experiencing right now will play out in the end in this world. But what we do know is that one day this world will pass away, and the trials and tribulations of this life were a process of our sanctification and the big picture is that we will be made whole in Christ for eternity. We acknowledge that we don’t understand and rest in the fact that “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” We are not guaranteed to know what His plans are or why He allows things to happen. What we are guaranteed to know is that He is sovereign God and in an every changing world, He is the only consistent piece. So we trust in that peace and assurance that these circumstances do not change what we know to be the character of our God. 

I have thought often about this journey that the Lord has brought us on and even read back through a lot of these blog posts. Last year, I wrote about trusting God with our desires. I wrote about taking a leap of faith in buying a crib right after we received Josiah's referral. I have seen the way our God has spoken to us through the Bible stories we have read so many times. Throughout scripture God is constant. Whether we like the result or not, God is the same God. 

God is sovereign. God is faithful. God is good.

So where do we go from here? We do not know. We are still fighting for Josiah. Josiah is still our son, and will always be our son. We still long for him to be home. We beg and plead with the Lord to make it so. We are trying to heal. We are asking the Lord to give us wisdom and discernment. We are praying that He will make level the paths of our feet so that we will know the direction He is leading. We are asking for Him to give us direction as to the next step to take. There are still a lot of conversations that are being had. Both our President and Vice President will be traveling to Russ*a soon and our new Secretary of State, John Kerry, is work on relations between the two countries. However, I am realizing more and more that this fight is bigger than us. 2 Chronicles 20 tells us, "God, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand and no one can withstand you...For we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do but our eyes are on you....This is what the LORD says to you; 'Do not be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God's." 

Without giving up, we are taking time to pray and rest in the Lord. I believe that our God is constant, unchanging, and so I have to continue to believe that our Savior cares about the orphans, for Josiah. He has not given up on them. He is fighting for them. He is for them. "What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?" He works all things for our good. He does not forsake his children. 

 God is sovereign. God is faithful. God is good.

I have used this verse before, but I am continuing to cling to it:  "And Moses said to the people, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.” Exodus 14:13-14  

 God is sovereign. God is faithful. God is good.