Quiet time, morning stories, breakfast, med distribution, quick load of laundry, first of 9000 loads of dishes, then I, with all my parenting wisdom and love turn on the electronic babysitter. Thank God for Netflix!
Now my time to check news and social media for extremely pressing and life shattering important information (said with sarcasm). Sad isn't it that my initial guard is cynicism and distrust? Thankfully this is just an initial somewhat subconscious emotion meant to protect my heart and mind from the ugly I am certain to see. Shaking that junk off I read on about lions, babies both born and unborn, bombs, emails, disease, murders, and a blip of hope thrown in for good measure. What would this all be without a flood of opinions in short an long form? I skim and few and skip a few. My heart is a mess and my mind is spinning once again. This is the world in which we live.

My mind settles as my heart calms and I am reminded of a precious young girl that came to live with us for a while. She was one of our first teenage foster children. She was hurting from years of unimaginable pain. Her coping mechanism was to harm herself. She once told me that if she did it first then it hurt less when others did it. Trying to keep her from hurting herself was a full time job but the effort and time were nothing compared to the ache in my heart for her. Oh how badly I wanted to take her pain away, to erase evil memories and rewrite her story. I watched as she progressed in her anorexia nervosa, continued to cut and sank deeper in her depression. In my house, in my care, even with my love she still hurt. I couldn't rewrite her story or take away her past hurts but I could give her my love. A love that was true and unconditional and would never end. This love did not cure her. It did however heal a place in both of our hearts unknown to either of us.

You see she was right in a way, if we hurt ourselves first it hurts less when others hurt us. We throw up our cynicism guard walls of protection unaware of how we are hurting ourselves and others. What if I would have read the news this morning with no walls? Very likely I would have been in tears, enraged, shocked, and just gone back to bed. My walls were my coping and in fact are an okay coping but nonetheless a coping mechanism. We all use them. Some are healthy and keep us safe and some are destructive with painful results. The news I read and the opinions plastering social media are just that. Coping. Not one of us can look at the world today and not be shaken. We all need to cope.
My hope is that we can love with a genuine and transparent love that breaks down walls and builds one another up and remember that everyone has a story that behind their walls.

See beyond!

With the delightfully countless directions my life goes in I am amazed with my one-track mind right now. Some may call this impatience however I prefer to refer to this, quite proudly, as incredible focus. That focus is on the last leg of our adoption of Emmanuel.  We have been in "process" for what feels like forever while in all reality it has been just over a year. A roller coaster of a year with some bumps and delays and many miracles. Now I am more than ready to have our son home and my focus increases by the day as we near the day of "the call". The call that will tell us to get on the plane and finish the race that we were called to and finish strong! Why strong you say? Our wee one will be coming home from Liberia, the third poorest country in the world. Thus meaning he has had little to no contact or understanding of the chaotic world us westerners are accustomed to. The flight will be a delight!

Quick, my mind is reeling with other thoughts.....
Thoughts brought on by my own words "chaotic world us westerners are accustomed to". Here my heart is heavy as I think of the lives affected by hatred, selfishness, greed, poverty, you name it. Have we become not only accustomed but dare I say, numb? The news flashes stories with graphic photos of horrific acts and we are unmoved. Unmoved or numb? Have we seen such pain and suffering and unspeakable atrocities that we simply do not allow the visual trauma to penetrate the emotional walls of protection we have placed. What then has our world become? What then have we become? Many questions pour forth with seemingly not a single answer. Wait! My above focus may be an answer. The focus I have, I feel, I live, may be also called LOVE. Can we love with focus and impatience? Impatience can be good, very good in fact. Impatience may stir in us a desire to fight harder for good, to seek justice, to be the voice for those who cannot speak, to refuse to settle and wait for what will happen but rather being a vital part of making things happen. Focus, impatience, love.

Love well!