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.