Our life is a little chaotic right now. It's a long story, but we are moving much quicker than we thought we would and if all goes right (does it ever??????), we will be moving this weekend. I am already exhausted thinking of the work that is coming, but I am excited at the thought of a new adventure. This really has been a time of trust for me.....which leads me to my point.
I learn more and more about this crazy life each day from just having a daughter. She is imaginative, curious and stubborn. I re-learn how to be fun from her and she is also a mirror for me to see the negative behaviors I have that she reflects. I often ask God to show me why He did things the way that He did in the matter of her birth and adoption. To me, a feeble minded human, it seems to me that He did things a little backwards. I can make sense and be okay with her being adopted. Reasonable enough to me. But, I start losing my wits when I think about why He waited two years for her to get here with us. I wonder why she had to go through the painful situations that she did and not be in the safety of our home. I don't know that I will ever know the true reasons for any of these things on this side of Heaven, but I do keep asking them.
About a week or so ago, some of these questions popped into my mind once again. I was driving to work and listening to the sounds of a happy preschooler telling her Barbie to "look me in the eye and don't move a muscle." (I know where she heard those words and I'm hoping that the I love you's that she hears stick too!) The normal questions wandered a little bit to my own self and the questions I have about why I had to go through the pain and heartache of infertility. The Holy Spirit took me through a series of "remember when's" in my mind where I traced back my grief to a span of about eight months where my grief was so bad I am suprised I made it through. I lost friendships in the middle of this grief, my marriage was not in the greatest place and I felt distant and abandoned by God. Not fun. It was the closest to physical pain I have ever felt that didn't quite make it there.
So as I traced these memories, I remembered a journal entry I wrote at the time asking God why I felt so displaced. I wrote, "I feel as though I have a child, but I am seperated from them and can't find my way." Immediately when I remembered those words, the Holy Spirit reminded me of the year that those eight months of heartache took place. 2004. Raylen was born August 13th of that year and obviously her birth mother was pregnant with her the first eight months of that year. I was astounded. The Spirit spoke to me not about the
why of our being seperated, but more about
how we were seperated. He showed me that just like my individual life was predestined by Him (Psalm 139:16), my life as a mother to Raylen and our relationship together was predestined by Him as well (Ephesians 1:11). I shiver in awe even now at that thought.
The Holy Spirit affirmed my "motherly instincts" that knew there was a part of me that existed but wasn't there and showed me that He had placed that in my heart at exactly the right time. The most important thing that He showed me was that I don't need to know the why's all the time, if ever. I need to trust the One who knows
how everything works together.
So, I hope to hide this lesson in my heart so that during this present chaos and the inevitable chaos in the future, I will trust the heart of God who places in my heart the desire to follow and trust Him for every how and why.
.JPG)
