In my high school and college days, I spent a lot of time doing math. Ever since I first learned of the limit in high school calculus, I’ve been interested in pushing it. I took as many Advanced Placement classes as possible in high school and told people I wanted to work in aerospace engineering. This got a much better response than “I want to get married, have babies and homeschool them,” which was really what I always wanted!
So here I am in what I might call an Advanced Placement level of parenting: training from the ground up a formerly institutionalized child while homeschooling three “homemade” kids. I was just telling my mom the other day, after she spent an eventful evening with them all, that most people will never associate with (much less live with) a person who was born and raised in an institution. It’s an unusual situation that has pushed Mason and me to our spiritual, emotional, and physical limits.
Though adoptive parenting has shown us our limits in painful ways, the plus side is we’ve learned to create margin in our lives. When things get really tough, we know to drop what we can from our schedules and focus on what’s most important. Despite the fact that we’re still on our way out of the woods with KJ (it’s a winding path), we shared recently that we were getting ready to jump into foster care. We submitted it to God and felt confident about it.
When the foster parent certification class started, we found ourselves in the midst of a wild week or two. It was well timed. We realized our desire to open our home to more children right now (in Christen World, this is the best time to do any good idea!) wasn’t taking into account the needs surrounding our latest addition.
We have good days/bad days, good weeks/bad weeks with Kami Joy. God used a string of bad days with her to clue us into the fact that our home is not “home-study ready”. (The home study is the several week process that a family goes through before they’re cleared to adopt or foster.) We know from our adoption home study that these are meetings where everything comes out in the open. Some of the difficult, intense feelings and struggles we’ve had in our parenting journey with KJ are still too fresh (as in, just happened yesterday) for us to be able to truthfully present ourselves as parents who are mentally and emotionally healthy enough to manage more trauma in our home right now. We’re grateful God showed us something through this string of hard days. There was a limit there that we didn’t know about. Some limits are meant to be pushed, and others are to be respected. This one had a sign over it:
Our family remains totally open to God’s leading, ready to welcome whoever He may bring into our family through whatever means He might choose. It’s comforting to realize that just because our orphan care capacity feels maxed out right now doesn’t mean it always will be. Plus, I am reminded there are many other ways to do orphan care, like supporting adoptive families financially or emotionally through the excitements and challenges of their journeys. In North Carolina, I attended an amazing adoption support group that inspired me to try to find or start that kind of group down here.
There are no limits to the ways God can direct us when we submit our ways to Him. When you have a personal relationship with Jesus, you’re able to do things that would be impossible on your own because it’s His mighty power at work within you doing way more than you can even imagine. God is a good Father, faithful to speak to us when we listen. What’s He saying to you today? Here’s His latest to me:
Don’t think that by serving Me more you can get Me to love you more. I don’t love you because of what you do for Me, I love you because of who I AM. Don’t seek relief from your adoptive parenting struggles by becoming a foster parent just yet. Love each of your 4 kids well; and especially focus on loving that fourth one into the fold.
These words were gifts to me. 🙂
Christen
Each Word a Gift 