James 4:13 "Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that."
Today was supposed to be a day of good news. Our paperwork was submitted today and we had waited all day for confirmation via phone or email.
The confirmation came that our paperwork was submitted. With it came heartwrenching news.
The girl, "Marlena", died yesterday during surgery to repair her heart.
The boy, "John Mark", is not available for adoption by request of his parents.
The hoped-for news has arrived, but has arrived bitter and dark. In the few lines of an email we have lost them both.
It is odd - we have not held these little ones in our arms. We have not seen them face-to-face or heard their little voices. Yet we have thought about them and picked out toys for them and prayed for them and and shared their first Christmas and loved them from around the world. The sharp pain of loss is no different than losing our own.
We are left with only pictures and ashes and questions in our hearts.
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The Hebrew alphabet has a character "VAV" or "WAW". It is shaped like a flag blowing in the wind, and can be used used to indicate a change in the direction of the writer's thoughts. I write the explanation in lieu of writing the character itself.
This is not the end.
To our friends and family who have supported us this far, we say "Thank you". Thank you for your love and care and putting up with us these last few months. Thank you for believing in us.
This is not the end of our adoption process. Our hearts are still burdened with the desire to adopt children with special needs. We still may be traveling this Spring to adopt (after all, our paperwork was submitted successfully). We will pick other children from the same area later, but for now, the grief is still too near.
--Ezra and Kelly
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Birthday Week
Yesterday was my 30th birthday!!! And no it doesn't feel any different than every other birthday. Maybe it will change the next time I have to fill out one of those forms that you check your age range on, since I will be a new bracket and all). Though I anxiously await this upcoming year of life on Earth. I am praying for a wonderful Birthday present tomorrow, when we should here those sweet words, "You were SUCCESSFULLY submitted!" Please pray with us as within less than 12 hours the agency will open in Eastern Europe for our facilitators to submit our paperwork. Though I'm not sure exactly what time our facilitators will do this tomorrow, but I THINK we should hear by the time we are awake and at work tomorrow.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
The Hammer
We had a good fundraiser at our church today. There was good food (burrito bar and banana pudding) and good fellowship. Kelly and I made a nice presentation, and we raised over $3000.
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In cartoons, there is a staple that I will call the Impossibly Large Hammer. Two characters are arguing and at some point one character pulls (out of nowhere) a wooden mallet roughly the double their size and proceeds to give the other one a good whacking. The traditional response is for afflicted character (after a proper amount of accordion-like wheezing) is to pull an even larger hammer out of thin air and return the favor.
The closer we get to our goal the bigger the hammer appears to be that will be used upon us. The hammer is rapidly growing impossibly large. In (hopefully) a few weeks or months we will find ourselves in a foreign country where we do not speak the language (not counting phrase-books "Yo soy un espía" or Lingo-matic tapes "Timid cows store porridge on the refrigerator at the bus station"). We will not know where we are, where we are going, or the other small details. We will be more or less at the complete mercy of the adoption team. There are a huge number of things that I *know* could go wrong, and that number pales to number of things that I don't know about. Even if everything runs smoothly we will still be coming home with two special-needs children who have urgent medical needs. If that is not going to take our comfortable lives and turn it completely upside down I don't know what would. There is a fine line between brave and stupid, but if we knew the dangers and the hammering we will face then we would never go.
Either God is sovereign or not at all. If Sovereign, then He is just as much in control here as he will be there. That is easy to say, but I can see the institutional supports here (I speak the language, I have friends and family, I know my way around, etc.) The harder thing is accepting that everything is for our good and for His glory. We don't see the purpose or the design immediately and being hammered hurts. The other thing is that the hammerings and refinings are what engineers like to call "sufficient and necessary". The hammering that we receive is not capricious or random - it is necessary. There is not a single blow of the hammer that falls without purpose. By the same token, there is not a single extra strike from the hammer, there is not hammering for the sake of hammering or an extra lick for good measure - each thud of the impossibly large hammer is metered and sufficient.
--Ezra
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In cartoons, there is a staple that I will call the Impossibly Large Hammer. Two characters are arguing and at some point one character pulls (out of nowhere) a wooden mallet roughly the double their size and proceeds to give the other one a good whacking. The traditional response is for afflicted character (after a proper amount of accordion-like wheezing) is to pull an even larger hammer out of thin air and return the favor.
The closer we get to our goal the bigger the hammer appears to be that will be used upon us. The hammer is rapidly growing impossibly large. In (hopefully) a few weeks or months we will find ourselves in a foreign country where we do not speak the language (not counting phrase-books "Yo soy un espía" or Lingo-matic tapes "Timid cows store porridge on the refrigerator at the bus station"). We will not know where we are, where we are going, or the other small details. We will be more or less at the complete mercy of the adoption team. There are a huge number of things that I *know* could go wrong, and that number pales to number of things that I don't know about. Even if everything runs smoothly we will still be coming home with two special-needs children who have urgent medical needs. If that is not going to take our comfortable lives and turn it completely upside down I don't know what would. There is a fine line between brave and stupid, but if we knew the dangers and the hammering we will face then we would never go.
Either God is sovereign or not at all. If Sovereign, then He is just as much in control here as he will be there. That is easy to say, but I can see the institutional supports here (I speak the language, I have friends and family, I know my way around, etc.) The harder thing is accepting that everything is for our good and for His glory. We don't see the purpose or the design immediately and being hammered hurts. The other thing is that the hammerings and refinings are what engineers like to call "sufficient and necessary". The hammering that we receive is not capricious or random - it is necessary. There is not a single blow of the hammer that falls without purpose. By the same token, there is not a single extra strike from the hammer, there is not hammering for the sake of hammering or an extra lick for good measure - each thud of the impossibly large hammer is metered and sufficient.
--Ezra
Friday, February 11, 2011
DELIVERED!
Our dossier has arrived in Eastern Europe. It will be translated and submitted. Hopefully we will hear by the end of the month when we will travel.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
GOLDEN TICKET DAY!!!
Today is our Golden Ticket DAY! What does this mean to all of my readers that are not up on their adoption lingo...This means that as soon as I can have this final document triple stamped (notarized, certified, and apostilled) I can mail off my paper pregnancy and entrust it to my facilitators in Eastern Europe. From there it will be translated, then turned in to the government agency there that handles adoptions. Upon reviewing our dossier, we will be submitted and will receive a travel date:)
For 2 weeks now I have been coming home EVERY DAY and eagerly checking the mail to see if it had come. And my hearts aches just a bit each time I open the mailbox and do not see an official looking envelope that MIGHT be it. I left work at 3:58 today, knowing that the mail comes to our house at 4:00 (I live 2-3 minutes away). When I opened the mailbox there it was on top of those junk papers everyone gets on tuesdays. I was so overjoyed at this little old piece of mail! We are so much closer now.
For 2 weeks now I have been coming home EVERY DAY and eagerly checking the mail to see if it had come. And my hearts aches just a bit each time I open the mailbox and do not see an official looking envelope that MIGHT be it. I left work at 3:58 today, knowing that the mail comes to our house at 4:00 (I live 2-3 minutes away). When I opened the mailbox there it was on top of those junk papers everyone gets on tuesdays. I was so overjoyed at this little old piece of mail! We are so much closer now.
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