Remembering

All feels right to me when my life is organized. When my desk is clean, my task list has lots of lines through it and my inbox is empty, my heart is at rest.

I’m quickly realizing that I need to scrap this strategy.

I haven’t really had to have a planning session to come up with new standards for myself, they are just sort of happening to me. How nice that is.

If all the papers on my desk haven’t piled up so much that I can’t shut the doors (it’s an armoire desk), it’s “clean.” If my inbox only has messages from two weeks ago, it’s practically empty. And if I’ve been able to pull away from the house with both kids strapped into their car seats and remembered to brush my teeth and put on deodorant …I feel like I’m going to the prom.

Every time I get dressed in anything other than my nike sweatpants and zip-up workout shirt, Eden says “mommy leaving?” And I used to judge moms who wore jumpers. Those things are a step up from my everyday duds. I’ve started to do laundry twice a week just so I can get more use out of them.

Life seems to have wrapped around my ankle and pulled me along as if I’m hitched behind a pick-up truck.

And I think I love it.

In the midst of this seeming chaos, the Lord continues to remind me that I’m caught up in a work of His doing. This life can appear frayed around the edges, but when I step back for a moment I catch my breath …and remember. And when I remember I think, “Oh, Lord …don’t ever let me forget. Let me write this story on the walls of my life, tell it to my children and my children’s children. Let them know you as holy because of this.”

So I guess as an act of remembrance, I want to go back and write some of the pieces of our story that were too raw to include while walking through them. Consider this “Part 1.”

Remembrance: Part 1

Today we had our first post-adoption meeting with our caseworker. When she asked about the children’s birth dates, I remembered.

Though not the first time I remembered, I think I absorbed it this time. What I’m about to share hasn’t even been uttered to some of my most dear of friends, but for some reason today it feels right and fitting to tell this as a piece of our story. His story.

In the Spring of 2005 I had a moment — followed by a few other moments — where God broke in. It wasn’t mystical, in fact it felt very natural. God spoke to me, not audibly but as a resounding sense in my spirit. As far as I could tell He said to me You will conceive a child this September.

Now while I believe in the voice of God speaking today, I also am wary of what I know even more intimately – my flesh. I can hear things I want to hear and my imagination at times might be just as clear as what I perceive to be the voice of God. So I asked Him for confirmation. Lord, if this is you …confirm it, not once but twice.

The details of His confirmation are extraneous to this story, but they were enough for me to believe with as much of my being as capable that Nate and I would be parents the following summer, 9 months after September of 2005. I thought He was gracious in preparing me, one who might benefit from having more than the typically allotted time to carry a baby. At that point in time we had no idea the challenges awaiting us with fertility. I’m not sure what came as expectation of the Lord and what was the expectation that most all newly marrieds have about getting pregnant. I like to believe it was more the former.

Leading up to this month, I knew that I knew that I knew that I would be pregnant. I had heard from God other times, but never this clearly and never did it carry the grace that this particular message did to spur my prayers on in faith. I wound up thanking God for what He was about to do more than even asking Him to do it. It was going to happen.

In early October I realized that what I had carried with such expectancy, didn’t happen. I was less disappointed at the prospect of not being a parent than I was at my own mis-guided expectations. I didn’t doubt God, but deeply questioned my own ability to hear. God wasn’t unfaithful, I just couldn’t hear Him correctly …I thought. More reason to exercise even more caution than I already did when hearing from the Spirit, I thought.

This month of disappointment grew into 4 years of disappointment. Insult to injury was that it wasn’t just that September that I didn’t conceive, but many fruitless Septembers, Octobers and Novembers followed.

By the grace of God I did not grow bitter. Most of my evaluations of that encounter with Him led me believing that I just didn’t hear Him right. I chalked it up to my humanity against His perfection. We’re bound to “miss” sometimes, right? But there was a very small part of me holding out hope in the mysterious God. I so wanted to one day make sense of that promise. It was a promise, I thought.

Fast forward to March of 2009. We received our referral for two children from Ethiopia after an arduous two years in the hamster wheel called adoption. One of the children was a little girl named Meskerem. We discovered that day that the name “Meskerem” meant September and our Ethiopian sources told us that with the significance Ethiopians placed on name meaning, we could be confident that this one was born in September.

At that moment, sort of grasping at straws, I thought …this had to be it. You see, I could not forget those encounters with God as they were as real to me as the grass on the ground.  I heard “you will conceive a child this September” in 2005, but really God was probably saying I would conceive a child with the name September. I didn’t hear quite right, but it was in the ballpark.

It was as if I needed to make provision either for myself and my fleshly inability to really here, or at a deeper level for God who can’t really speak today because that speaking would require hearing and the very humans He created just can’t be trusted with hearing. But He wanted me to hold out. The phrase that came to me that Spring was so clear and so specific.

Then, just after we passed court in June of 2009, we received little Meskerem’s birth date:

September 25, 2005

While a mother on one continent gave birth to a child, that same child was conceived for another mother, halfway around the world. Little Meskerem’s birth was this adoptive mom’s conception. The day she was begotten on this earth, she was destined to be mine.

Months before our referral I specifically asked that the Lord would give us confirmation that these two adopted children were ours. He knew before I asked and gave me confirmation, 4 years earlier. Prepare. Wait. It will be a long gestation, but you will give birth. Your conception lies at the hands of another mother’s birth.

And today when our caseworker asked me for Eden’s birthday, I remembered. As she asked the question, Eden was crawling from my lap to Nate’s, dress around her waist and bum in the air, just as if no time had been lost between my conception of her and her arrival into our home.

The mystery of God hinges on pain and wonder. The first a cause for greater reception of the other.