Thoughts in the Waiting

We’ve been on a journey since fall.  Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens.   During the decision to adopt, we sifted through many questions...about ourselves, about adoption, about the unknown.  Your faithfulness stretches to the sky.  When Ethan was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes November 13th, we were grateful we didn’t have a child coming soon.  Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains.    Now we wait for her and it seems long.  Your justice flows like the ocean’s tide. And in another space of life...

Today I spend time with women who have journeyed hard and long to this strange place called America.   As the women sew and cut fabric, the languages are foreign, yet by now a familiar, sweet cadence in the background along with the hum of sewing machines.  Are they talking about what’s happening There, that place they call home?  Here, life is a sea of whiteness, my green eyes gazing into brown, seeking to understand for a small moment what it must be like.  I have not had the privilege of life spent in another place, another culture.  I grab what I can from brief hours with these women.  Today I grab this:    The spirited laughter of these women... the accomplishment of a cloth well sewn as the sun blazes through the windows of our tiny space... behind this two-hour stretch of time, this season, this place, these faces, there are stories untold. Husband and wife separated for so long.  Families ripped from the land on which they were born.  Children growing up without knowing about There.   Culture lost.    Crazy English struggles to come easily off the tongue.  On the way home, a sweet, quiet voice tells her story.  Another says, I get it.  What she got is something I will never get.   Never have I walked in such heart-wrenching difficult shoes.    Crying out to God to take away the hard and replace it with the good.  I go home and the other stuff fades.   

Waiting.  These women know all about waiting, know all too well how the best-laid plans somehow turn awry.  Six years waiting.  Ten years waiting.  Still waiting.

I will lift my voice

To worship You, my King

I will find my strength

In the shadow of your wings

From Your Love, O Lord by Third Day