Getting Over Ourselves, Part 2

Snapshot: Three years ago, in September 2008, I was recovering from a life-changing, eight-hour panic attack that left me physically, emotionally, and spiritually broken. I was scared to sleep in my bed. Scared to take a shower. Scared to feed my kids. Scared to pray. I was questioning my health, my sanity, and my salvation. Realizing I’d built my life’s foundations on answers to questions I’d never actually asked. My world had come apart, and I didn’t have a clue how to begin putting it back together.

Snapshot: A spring evening, 2009. The moment my husband walked through our front door, I dropped my knife and a half-sliced potato onto the cutting board, asked him to watch the kids, and escaped the house. Speedwalking a mile through the rain helped the panic subside a little faster, but the familiar aftermath of fatigue and hopelessness followed me all the way to the cemetery, where I sank to the wet ground and sobbed into my drawn-up knees. When my tears were spent and my clothes soaked through, the only prayer I could form was, “I need you. Please…rescue me.” I walked home slowly, wet and chilled, my eyes on the pavement as I envisioned Jesus’ sandaled feet striding with mine.

Snapshot: On the morning of May 10, 2011, I stood outside of a government building in Kigali, Rwanda praying that on this day the battle for our referral would at last come to an end. As we kept vigil in that courtyard, I recited aloud Moses’ words to the Israelites on the banks of the Red Sea. “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today… The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still” (Exodus 14:13-14). At 4:15 that afternoon, I held my daughter for the first time.

Snapshot: On the afternoon of June 3, 2011, twelve days after returning from Africa, I locked the bathroom door, turned on a hot shower, and climbed into my bathtub confessional for a good, long, soul-searching cry. The next day I wrote this to my long-suffering friend Allie:

“I was in the shower talking to God about all of this [depression, guilt, anger, shame, etc.]…and an image popped into my head. I told Him I felt like Eustace in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, after he'd been turned into a dragon and desperately wanted to peel off that hideous skin. That's where I went wrong, where I've been going wrong for the past month. I tried so hard to change my attitude, cheer up, focus on good things, snap out of it. I tried. Me, myself, and I. I even asked God to help me do it. But until yesterday I didn't fall on my face and say, "I can't do it. Please, please, please do it for me. It has to be all You. Only You can tear away this filthy, putrid, suffocating skin and set me free."

Where am I going with this? Two years ago my earthly father wisely stated that God is always working in us to achieve our surrender (to Him) of something we hold too dear. I don’t know if you see the connection, but these four snapshots of my life reflect the birthing pains of an education in surrender.

I’m currently enrolled in a lifelong course called “Surrendering My Powerlessness to an All-Powerful God,” and this is what I’m learning:

I cannot do it. Any of it.

But…BUT…He can.

And yet, inexplicably, I struggle to remember this lesson no matter how many times I take the class. I’m constantly pouring my limited energy into finding my solutions to my problems, and the result is always the same: I’m exhausted, alone, and defeated facing the mountains of discouragement, irritability, challenging relationships, overwhelming schedules, parenting struggles, spiritual dryness, and financial concerns.

I need to get over myself. Again, and again, and again.

I’ve tried to be The Little Engine Who Could. I’ve tried to climb every mountain through sheer force of will, puffing, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…” Guess what. It never works. I strive and strive and strive until I’m all strived out, with nothing but an overheated boiler to show for it.

I’ve also tried to be The Little Engine Who Could…With Help. Arming myself with poor theology, out-of-context Scriptural promises, and a few Christianese pep talks, I’ve chugged away with “I know we can, I know we can, I think we can, I’m…pretty sure we can…” Same result.

In every hard-fought battle of my life, it's only when I acknowledge that I'm The Little Engine Who Can’t that I actually make any headway. When I trade in my positive-thinking and self-confidence for humility and surrender, my mantra changes to, “I know I can’t, I know HE can!”

And isn’t that the way of the Savior? An ark for the flood. A dry seabed for the escaping Israelites. A sacrificial Lamb for the sin-stained world. How He loves to save us when we cannot save ourselves!

We don’t always see it. Sometimes He parts the waters, and sometimes (more often) He makes us swim. Or, as Scott Krippayne brilliantly sings, “Sometimes He calms the storm, and other times He calms His child.”

Why one methodology and not the other? How we love to bog ourselves down with that question. Truly, it’s one only He can answer in full, but I’m finding that my questions are more easily put to rest when I remind myself of His endgame: the increase of His glory.

Think about this: When the blue gate of Home of Hope finally opened to Tim and I, and we held Avivah for the first time, a lot of people rejoiced. God was glorified as His children praised Him for answered prayers and the powerful evidence of His hand in our adoption. He was glorified in His faithfulness and mercy. But that wasn’t the beginning of the story, and it’s certainly not the end. Before that appointed moment, there was the grueling wait. And before the wait, there was the refining process of preparing our hearts to consider adoption.

Each step of our journey brought us higher by first bringing us lower. Being forced to swim the sea showed us our weakness and caused us to reach in surrender for His strong hand. In that He was glorified. Each time we acknowledged that there needed to be more of Him and less of us, He was glorified. Each time we said, “Lord, not our will but yours be done,” He was glorified.

He is glorified in jars of clay. He is glorified in weakness. He is glorified in The Little Engine Who Can't.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” John 15: 5

This is Lesson #1 in living for His glory. Stay tuned for Lesson #2…

Getting Over Ourselves, Part 1

On Saturday I went to a picnic for adoptive families. One of the moms asked me how long it had taken us to bring Avivah home, and I told her we’d waited almost exactly two years. Her response? “Wow, that was quick, then!”

My initial instinct was, of course, to contradict her with, “No, actually it was the longest two years of my life, and I have the gray hairs and ulcer to prove it.” I refrained, because in her arms she cradled her beautiful baby girl who’d come home from China six weeks earlier. A child for whom she’d waited five years.

She wins, right? Surely her wait was harder because it was far longer than my own. And surely my adoption experience with Avivah—with all its lies, betrayals, confrontation, and drama—was harder than another mother’s two-year process that went smoothly and as expected from beginning to end (if such a thing exists).

Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of Numbers on Netflix, but I can’t help wondering if Charlie Eppes could come up with an algorithm for classifying the degree of hardship suffered in each person’s adoption experience. He could factor in waiting times, paperwork snafus, dashed expectations, personality types, travel issues, financial burdens, physical health, marital conflict, and spiritual maturity to come up with highly accurate ratings of our individual angst. Wouldn’t that be great? Being able to point to a definitive number would really save us time. I mean, if I’m a 27 and you’re a 34 on the Adoption Misery Scale, enough said, right? You win. Why even bother telling each other our stories?

I hope you’re picking up on the sarcasm by now. And I hope you know that the point I’m trying to make is an admonition to myself more than anyone else. In this matter I am the worst of sinners, though I know I’m not alone. It seems we’ve created a culture of comparison. I recognize it running rampant in the adoption community, and I despise what it does to our relationships. I have a friend whose heart is breaking a little more every day as she waits for a slow-moving government to process the final paperwork so she can bring home her little girl. Her pain is real and crushing, but she apologizes for it because her experience has been so “short and smooth” compared to mine.

I have other friends who nearly lost their referred children to illness before they ever had a chance to meet them. Another who received a referral and fell in long-distance love with her son only to learn that he had died suddenly of sickness that probably could have been defeated with a common antibiotic and adequate nutrition. And I know of some who sailed through the paperwork and waiting only to discover that being home with their children feels more like a nightmare than a dream come true. Then there’s me, still worn out from the labor of waiting, still processing three traumatic weeks in Africa, and still struggling to make sense of a little thing called post-adoption depression.

In the past 79 days since my last blog post, I’ve spent most of my time waffling between three unpleasant emotional states: feeling sorry for myself, angry at myself, or ashamed of myself. Occasionally I’m capable of achieving all three at once, and it was last week during one of those unfortunate meltdowns that my husband suggested I go away for a few days. Alone. Just me and Jesus.

Those plans are in the works, but in the meantime I’ve had to settle for an afternoon at Panera and a few really long showers. And after all the crying, complaining, repenting, praying, journaling, and thinking, this is what I’ve realized:

It’s time to get over myself.

In typical American fashion we’re forgetting that life isn’t about us. Adoption isn’t the be-all, end-all of significant life choices. It’s a thing we do, not who we are. Is it hard? Absolutely. Life is hard. But no matter how hard it is, the degree of difficulty doesn’t matter. It’s completely irrelevant.

We’re missing the bottom line. God didn’t breathe life into us so we could rescue a child, advocate for a worthy cause, or perform some great act of sacrifice or service. His beautiful, complicated, perfect architecture of our lives has one supreme objective: Glory. His, not ours. Whatever else we do, if we’re not pointing to and applauding who He is—His power, grace, faithfulness, mercy, and holiness—we’re wasting our time, because God isn’t glorfied by circumstances or external results, but by the internal posture of our hearts.

Suffering algorithms. Degrees of difficulty. Failure, pain, and death. That’s one side of the coin. The other is prettier, dressed with victory, healing, success, and dreams come true. But like all coins, regardless of how different each side appears, they both have the same value: the opportunity to bring glory to God every moment of every day.

So. How do we do that? When it’s 4:30 p.m. and the kids are breaking their toys (or each other) and the dog is underfoot while you try to throw together a passably healthy meal from the sparse contents of a refrigerator you no longer have the time or energy to restock, and you’re wondering what your life is about and how getting a steam burn from broccoli al dente can possibly have any kind of eternal significance, where’s the glory?

I’ll give you a hint: I haven’t figured it out yet. But I have some thoughts, which I’ll share soon in Part 2. For now, I have veggies to steam and a grocery list to write.

Stay tuned…