for those suffering in silence

In an effort to make good on my previous commitment to be real, I wrote the following as a guest post for Kim Van Brunt's blog {Honestly} Adoption:

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. May, 2011.

The screams have finally ceased, replaced by shuddering sighs as my newly adopted daughter gradually surrenders to fitful sleep in my arms. Perched on the edge of the mattress, I complete my third consecutive hour of rhythmic rocking and humming, and then begin another. It will be several more minutes before I can ease my rigid embrace and attempt to lay her down.

My arms burn from the extended effort of restraining a thrashing two-year-old. Perspiration, hers and mine, soaks my shirt, the blanket with which I’ve swaddled her, and her brand new Carter’s pajamas. The hot dampness smells of strife and mocks my pre-adoption visions of this bedtime ritual. I’d imagined the rocking, swaddling, and humming. I just hadn’t planned on the full-body wrestling, blood-curdling screams, clawing fingers, and buckets of sweat.

Then again, few things about our three weeks in Africa have gone as planned...

(To read the remainder of this post, please click on {Honestly} Adoption.)

Being Me.

It's been 97 days since my last post. I've been avoiding you. But please, don't take it personally. It's not you...it's me.

I've been trying to figure out which Me to be. Facebook Me, who's mostly happy and hopeful and always out to capture simple, quirky everyday moments with my kids? Blogger Me who once wrote mournful posts about the insufferable adoption waiting and now composes mini-sermons that vaguely allude to troubles at home but wrap the solutions up with pretty, uncomplicated bows? Pinterest Me, who is obsessed with planning decor for our new house and uncovering ingenious new homeschooling techniques for getting my kids to memorize sight words?

Or Real Me, who watches marathon episodes of Burn Notice instead of studying her Bible, plucks white hairs out of her scalp while waiting at red lights, and has been known to eat peanut M&Ms off the floor as long as she can still remember with reasonable certainty when they were lost.

Real Me is dangerous, because she knows things I'd rather hide and forget. She knows that there's no sin in the spectrum of evil that I'm incapable of committing. Real Me makes me face my utter depravity and calls me to surrender the many tools I use to anesthetize myself from honest introspection and the corrective action that must follow.

This week Real Me has been contemplating Jeremiah 2:12-13: "Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate," declares the Lord, "for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water."

What are my cisterns? Some of them are easy to name: television, novels, food, respect from peers, financial success, etc. But what about the ones that don't look like cisterns? There's one right under my feet. I'm standing in it, in fact, and until just now I didn't even realize it was here. I can't quite make out the name, but it has something to do with Adoption.

Expectations of. Disappointment with. Challenges through. Heartache over. Failures in.

Real Me wants to figure out how she got down here, find a way out, and warn others not to fall in. Facebook Me wants to write a status about how beautiful the night sky looks through that narrow hole in the top. Blogger Me wants to quote a line from Beth Moore's Get Out of That Pit and wax eloquent about scaling the walls, but not actually go anywhere. Pinterest Me wants to figure out how to make a bench for myself out of an old suitcase and some pillow stuffing.

Real Me wins.

I hope.

Getting Over Ourselves, Part 3

In the not-too-distant past, I was enslaved by hypochondria. For anyone who’s suffered with it, you know that slavery is the appropriate term. Every day I woke up to a shadow of dread, my thoughts consumed with the multitude of diseases that were surely eating away my life minute by minute. On the bad days, I was obsessed with sudden killers (heart attacks, blood clots, etc.). The so-called good days involved subtler enemies like cancer or lupus. I spent hours on the internet every day looking up symptoms, which of course led me to more health problems I hadn’t yet imagined. Fear gripped me so tightly I could barely bring myself to speak to my children or perform basic household duties. I didn’t want to make plans for more than a few days in advance, because I was certain I wouldn’t be around to see them come to fruition. And all because of nothing more than a persistent headache or a twinge of joint pain.

I recognized my problem, so for the most part I stayed away from the doctor’s office. I knew I was a hypochondriac, and I was ashamed of myself. I also realized that my fears were rooted in something deeper, and the only way to ever be free of them was to dig deep and uncover the malignant source. I sought counseling from someone at my church, and that was the beginning of a long journey to healing that I haven’t yet completed.

During the beginning stages of recovery, I saw one of my worst fears play out in the life of my good friend. A wife and mother of two, beautiful and vibrant in her early 30s, she was suddenly diagnosed with lymphoma. Not just early stage, we-caught-it-in-plenty-of-time lymphoma. This was stage 4, spread throughout her body.

When she called to give me the news, I burst into tears. She comforted me. While I begged God to spare her life and asked him why? why? why?, she prayed for opportunities to glorify God and looked forward to her chemo treatments because she knew that sitting in a chair for several hours would give her lots of time to tell other cancer patients about Jesus.

I marveled at her strength, and also cringed at it, because the light of her faith illuminated the ugly weakness of my own. I remember talking to my mother about it. “I don’t understand how she can be so at peace with this,” I said. “If it ever happened to me, I don’t think I’d survive the fear, let alone the cancer. How can you prepare yourself for something like that?”

My mom’s response sounded simple, but I’m beginning to realize how profound it really was. “You can’t store up faith. God gives us what we need when we need it. His grace is the reason she’s so strong.”

Our small group has been working through John Piper’s study Battling Unbelief, which is all about our faith in God’s grace and its implications in our lives as His children. In spite of the less than exciting presentation (John Piper using overheads during a seminar), the content is fantastic. In a recent lesson, he repeated my mother’s words almost verbatim. This is how he explained it:

Matthew 6:34 says, “Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” Lamentations 3:22-23 says “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Put those verses together, and what do you have?

According to Piper, it’s an equation. If your problems today are four times more than what you can handle, God’s grace is going to give you at least four times more strength, sanity, courage, etc. than you have...today.

In other words, when your newly adopted child suddenly hates you (again) and goes back to loving every stranger she meets, and the anger and hurt is at a raging boil that makes you want to scream and cry and hit something all at once, and all you can think about is how easy and natural it was to have a healthy, loving relationship with your biological kids…that’s not the time to think about the months and years ahead and wonder how things will ever change or question whether or not you’re going to survive.

When it’s 11:00 on Friday morning and your inbox is still refusing to ding with that long-awaited message, when the weight of waiting is suffocating and you can’t remember what life was like when you didn’t have to live every day in limbo, and your hope for a happy ending is fading with each minute that ticks past a foreign country’s office hours…that’s not the time to wonder how you’re going to make it to Monday, or how you’ll survive if that email never comes.

You’re at the end of your rope, and tomorrow promises more of the same. So take a breath and remember this: There will be a new rope tomorrow. Each day dawns with its own lifeline.

My friend is still with us, and by God’s amazing grace she’s now cancer-free and still passionate about sharing Jesus.

My hypochondria is no longer a daily torment, but rather an enemy I’ve learned how to fight. Our skirmishes are still more frequent than I’d like, but by God’s grace I’m becoming skilled in battle.

Some days my daughter won’t look me in the eye and spends all her energy wooing strangers or finding ways to be destructive, and I spend all my energy trying not to quit. But when she woke up sick and coughing early this morning, by God’s grace I found the strength to rise from bed and comfort her, this child for whom love is still a mystery.

To God be the glory. Great things He has done.

Great things He will do again.

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…

let's chew on this...

After about a week in Africa, I developed an intense craving for ice-cold milk.
The funny thing about this is that I hardly ever drink milk at home. I have the occasional glass with a piece of cake or spoonful of chocolate chip cookie dough (yum…talk about a craving), but it’s far from a daily staple of my diet.

I also found myself fantasizing about chomping through a nice big bag of peanut M&Ms. No surprise there - they’re my all-time favorite candy. And I was dumb enough not to bring any with me, thinking that junk food was the last thing deserving of space in our luggage (a decision I kicked myself for at the end of many a chocolate-worthy, frustration-filled day). As a consolation I tracked down a KitKat…and discovered that the familiar wrapper and logo can sometimes house a very foreign African product. Same goes with the Milky Way (it should have been packaged as a 3 Musketeers).

Unfortunately, my milk craving was never satisfied in Africa (in desperation I tried the boxed stuff and just about lost my lunch), but not so the peanut M&Ms. On one of our last nights in Rwanda our wonderful friends and fellow travelers, Dillon and Adrienne Stengel, spotted a tiny packet of the heavenly treats in a shop and bought them for me. When Dillon delivered them to our hotel room as a surprise, his big smile said he knew exactly how precious was the treasure he carried in that little brown bag.

Did you know that African peanut M&Ms have a matte rather than glossy finish, and the colors aren’t as bright, but (praise the Lord) they taste exactly like American M&Ms? There probably weren’t more than fifteen little nuggets of deliciousness in that package, but every one of them tasted like a long-anticipated luxury.

Fast forward one month. We’d been home from Africa for almost four weeks (during which I’d had enough peanut M&Ms to more than make up for missing them overseas), and I rushed into the grocery store to buy hot dogs for a Father’s Day get-together. I didn’t have time to spare, but I ended up standing in front of that meat cooler for at least five minutes before finally digging out my cell phone and calling for back-up. Which dogs should I buy? I needed someone to make the decision for me. Smoked? Original? Bun-length? All beef? Four to a package, or five? The ones on sale, or the expensive ones? What was the difference, anyway? There were too many options, and trying to sort through them to make the best decision was more than I could handle. It brought me to tears.

I had a similar experience at Walmart last week. All I wanted was a box of raisin bran for Avivah. I pushed my cart into the cereal aisle and spotted it right away. Raisin Bran (the brand) next to the generic raisin bran that was way cheaper. I grabbed the generic and started to roll, until my eyes caught another box of raisin bran a little farther down the aisle. It looked like the exact same box, but it was about $.80 cheaper. I picked it up, compared the boxes. What was I missing?

And then I saw the others. A whole shelf of raisin brans. Original. Extra raisins. Crunchy. Generic. Organic. Big boxes. Small boxes. The selection was a Dr. Seuss book waiting to happen.

These two odd, post-Africa shopping experiences have made me ask myself how much of my time and energy is spent making decisions about things that DO NOT MATTER. Every time I go shopping, I have to sort through the options for almost every product on my list (brand, size, price, variation, quality, etc.). If I want to be frugal, I can’t just grab the first thing I see and go with it. I wonder how many cumulative hours I’ve spent in the aisles doing price comparisons alone.

I know from my experience with the peanut M&Ms that limited options can lead to deeper appreciation and decreased pickiness. And I know from my unsatisfied craving for cold, unboxed cow’s milk that options can also be beautiful things. So I’m not saying I’m ready to live without them, or even that I think we should.

What I’m asking myself is this: how do I live an eternally focused life in a culture that is constantly trying to distract me with non-essential issues?

For example, on Hulu the other day (yeah, yeah...I know) I saw an ad for a new prescription medication that makes your eyelashes grow. Really? I’m the first person to admit my eyelashes could use some help, but up to this point I haven’t lost any sleep over them. Am I going to look back on my life when I’m eighty and say, “Gee whiz, I sure am glad I marched myself to the doc and spent that time and money on the eyelash cream. It changed my whole life.”

Will I say that about my Netflix subscription? My affinity for Starbucks’ peppermint mochas? My perfectly coordinated summer wardrobe? My peanut M&Ms? (gulp)

Now, here’s the next question: If the most Christ-centered, eternally significant life does not call for those things, does that mean it’s wrong to indulge in them?

I’m not preaching here, I’m asking. I don’t know what to do with this question or the potential answers I’ve wrestled with over the past two years since I started thinking about it.

All I know for certain is that life felt simpler for those three weeks in Africa when my options were limited. Want to watch TV? The only English-speaking channel on Rwandan television is airing an advanced chemistry class, so have at it! I did. I also grew to be satisfied with surviving all day on a single CLIF bar while waiting for paperwork at government offices, and wearing my clothes more than once between washings. I didn’t stress out about having a bad hair day or smelling a little funky after a day spent in buildings without AC. Part of it was that I had few choices. The other part was that I was too focused on my mission to waste brain power and emotional energy on the insignificant stuff of life.

And that brings me to another question. What is my life focus? Does this dilemma of mine stem from lack of vision rather than exposure to too many options that satiate my wordly wants?

I don’t expect to answer these questions in a single blog post. I’m just putting them out there and asking you to ponder them with me. Adoption got me started wrestling with these things, and I have to wonder if God is going to use it as a catalyst to something even more life-changing than I first imagined.

Wherever He leads me, I will follow.

I just hope it’s someplace with peanut M&Ms.

decompressing

I’ve been pondering my next blog post for far too long, and since I haven’t come up with the brilliant new addition I’ve been hoping for, I decided it was time to just sit down and tell you all what’s been on my mind.

Today we’ve officially been home with Avivah for one month. Life with our little girl is at times full of fun and fulfillment, other times frustration and confusion. I am in awe of all God did to bring our precious child home, and I am in awe of how desperately I need Him every day to help me decipher the complexities of my new daughter and train my heart to respond in the way she needs.

Okay, now that the homefront update is out of the way, I want to talk about our time in Africa. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to do that yet (hence my hours of pondering and lack of posts). So much of what happened there involves procedural details and specific officials, and I know that a public forum is not the appropriate place to share those experiences.

I’ll say this: it was painful and exhausting, beautiful and life-changing. I found myself battling emotions I didn’t expect (still dealing with that) and looking at myself and my life through new lenses that made me ever more aware of my need for the truth proclaimed in the title of this blog.

I still haven’t processed all I saw and did in Africa, but I have a sense that my time there was not the end of our adoption process, but rather the beginning of something much bigger. Something that goes far beyond adoption, and far beyond me.

I remember with such clarity the moment I climbed the stairs to board our flight out of Kigali. It was 1:30 a.m. and the air was cool and damp. I paused at the top of the steps, just before ducking into the plane, and drew a deep breath, thinking, This might be the last time I breathe the air of Rwanda. Avivah was strapped into the Ergo, her warm body limp against my chest as she slept, but I had the urge to wake her and make her take notice. “We’re leaving your birthplace, child. You might never see this place again.” I looked out at the city lights blanketing the hills and tried to stuff down the pain of that thought. This isn’t right, my heart lamented. We can’t leave like this. Not in darkness. Not without more time to say goodbye.

The irony wasn’t lost to me even in that moment. We had prayed for miracles for two weeks, and on that last day we had seen God move more than one mountain to get us on our flight as scheduled. But my heart still ached to stay, not only for myself but for my poor daughter, who had only met us three separate times during visiting hours at the orphanage. The day we left Kigali was the first day she left the orphanage. Her first night with us would be spent in the Ergo on a crowded flight to Addis. We had every legal document in hand, but leaving that way, under the cover of darkness while she slept unaware on my (a stranger’s) chest…it felt like we were stealing her. Or stealing something from her.

The remorse over our departure never went away. In fact, it’s intensified. I want to go back. I feel like I left something there, or missed something, and I have to return to find it. I don’t know what to do with that sensation, so I’m trying to find the balance between holding it at a distance so it doesn’t drive me crazy, and keeping my eyes on it just in case God has a related plan brewing sooner rather than later.

I also have a feeling that as I continue to decompress from our travels and adjust to life with Avivah, I’m going to need to do more writing to stay sane. Hence the new banner and subtitle to the blog, and the new look. It’s time for the next chapter. I hope you’ll all turn the page with me.