After This I Looked

20,000 people standing together in a great crowd, singing without the help of guitar or drum, just voices. People from countries all over the world. From every state in the union. People who spoke English and Mandarin and Spanish and Igbo. People who were joined together, in all their beautiful differences, by their belief in a good and beautiful God.

I once stood in the midst of such a gathering.

Putting that moment into words is nearly impossible. That many voices joined as one. To be able to hear the solitary voice next to me while at the same time hearing the words "Hallelujah, salvation and glory" sung in glorious harmony by thousands of others, a song that literally shook the rafters of that colosseum, well, there are really no words.

It was a taste, just a taste, of heaven. 

And it was a taste that I know has driven much of who I have become. 

Revelation 7: 9-11 says this:

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”

That scripture, that perfect picture of humans, fully reconciled, fully themselves, worshiping together in harmony. Not in one assimilated "heavenly" language. Not as ethereal whitish beings floating around. But as God's glorious creation, without hatred, beautiful in their outward differences, free from division, worshiping as one.

That picture is beauty my friends. 

And that scriptural picture is one I hold tightly side by side with my shining earth-bound moment of tasting it. I let it drive what I see and what I hope for. I let it color my conversations and anchor my faith. I learned at some point to pray the Lord's Prayer often and fervently. To pray it as more than a discipline, but as a declaration. The calling down of God's presence here on earth. Saying over and over again "on earth as it is in heaven" and believing that even though we know the world will always be broken, that God is active and loving and calling us into the work of hope and action that believes we can see the beauty of heaven in the everyday. 

For the last three months, I have been privileged to co-lead a group that is trying, in our tiny little corner of Virginia, to be a part of inviting God's will for reconciliation and diversity into our church. 

For three months, we have studied the scriptures and talked about justice and oppression and hope. For three months we have talked about slavery and the Native American Genocide, about power, about Black Lives Matters and police brutality, about unfair housing practices and redlining and whitewashed school curricula and segregation and white supremacy. We have talked about awareness and self-education and lament and repentance and forgiveness. We have shared our own experiences of race in America and in the church. There has been anger and defensiveness and tears and frustration and guilt. And sometimes, yes, even joy and laughter.

It has NOT been easy. 

Why? 

Because it is not supposed to be easy. 

in his book "Coming Together: The Bible's Message in an Age of Diversity" Curtiss DeYoung says this says this:

"Systems of injustice in society and in the church exact a heavy cost on those outside the centers of power and effectively block reconciliation" and "declaring that we are equal without repairing the wrongs of the past is cheap reconciliation."

The true work of reconciliation is deep, hard, soul-wrenching work. 

We could have sat around and declared our equality in God's sight and charged forward together singing Kum-Ba-Yah. But that is what churches have done over and over again and change never happens. It's cheap reconciliation that is not founded on repentance and hope. It's cheap reconciliation that seeks action without personal and communal repentance. 

We wanted better for our church. For our tiny little piece of heaven on earth. Our emotions in this process don't scare God. The Be the Bridge curriculum we have used says that the "ultimate aim of reconciliation is the restoration of broken relationships, whether between individuals or entire communities. True reconciliation requires commitment and sacrifice from both sides." 

As anyone knows, the work of restoring relationships is some of the hardest work we are ever called to do. It can be painful. It can require us to work through anger and bitterness. It usually invites us to lay ourselves down for one another. That is messy, gospel work.

So here we are: 

Men and women (with a few precious faces missing) who participated

Black and white. Men and women. American-born and internationals. Northerners and southerners. Republicans and Democrats and Independents.

Falling at the throne of God together to ask for deep grace and forgiveness. Admitting the ways we have not known. The ways we have failed to act. The ways we have chosen comfort over risk. And clinging to the hope and beauty of the cross together as we do it. 

We want more. More for our church. Our neighborhoods. Our schools. Our nation. 

And so we will continue to meet. We'll talk about reparations and restoration. We'll dig into the continual and cyclical process of awareness, acknowledgment, lament, repentance and forgiveness.

And we will do it together, messily and unashamedly and in ways that will bring healing and positive changes to the world around us.

Because that, my friends, is what the church does.

Sensory Mama Speaks Up

If you are a parent, chances are you've spent hours researching something. Maybe it was food triggers or daycares or schools or vaccines or whatever. Something caused you to pore over the internet looking for desperate answers.

For me, when my sweet baby turned 11 months and started throwing massive tantrums, I turned to sensory research. A few people suggested it after interacting with my son. It was something I knew a little bit about because of some friends with children who have sensory processing disorders, but really didn't know the details.

After reading up and talking to some friends and our doctor, it became obvious: this kid was spirited, but did not have anything sensory going on. At least not that we could figure out. So no help there.

But you know what did happen?

My husband turned to me and said "Sound familiar?"

Because it did. Painfully familiar. Not because of my children. Because of me.

Things I had always seen in myself and just thought were personality quirks. Hating for anyone to ever touch my face because even a little bit caused physical pain, not being able to handle repetitive loud noises, losing myself with too much noise and touch to the point of feeling like the only solution would be to curl up in a dark closet until it could all go away. Feeling like a failure that prayer couldn't keep me calm in the midst of parenting some days.

And you know what? What I thought was a lack of maternal instinct to handle the early years (and maybe still is on some level, I'm just not a baby person) might have been compounded by an actual physical problem with all the screaming and touching that comes with baby and toddlerhood.

And maybe, just maybe, there were actual solutions to feeling like my brain was going to explode halfway through the day.

I asked a good friend for a list and she shared some tips with me- some of them were things I could do IN THE MOMENT of feeling like it was all to much - these were things her son needed to calm down and if they work on kids, why not me? Not things I could do later when my husband got home, like read my books or go for a run or have quiet time to myself. But things, when in those deepest, darkest moments of feeling like I was going to snap and it was just all too much, things I could pull away and do. Or even do WITH a child still attached to me.

What is the list she sent?

- tight hugs/wraps
- deep massage 
- joint compressions
- therapeutic brushing
- impact
- weight bearing 
- heavy lifting

I have found for myself that the most effective way to keep my brain from going from overload to meltdown (and my meltdowns look like sad despair, not tantrums) are exercise, weight bearing and heavy lifting activities.  Please stay away from me with those hugs, though. Seriously. The last thing I was is someone to touch me with a compassionate look in his or her eyes when I am about to lose it. I will have to resist the urge to punch you.

And it turns out that when you have a ginormous toddler, it is tremendously easy to find weight bearing and exercise activities in the moment of chaos.

So yes, my neighbors, if they were to look out the window might see my toddler laying on my back while I do push-ups and loving every minute of it. Or see me using the monkey bars to do pull-ups  or chin-ups while he screams about something unknowable  - doing just enough that I can bring my mind back to sane and calmly deal with his meltdown since I've avoided my own - and honestly, half the time he stops freaking out when he sees me do them and just laughs and points at "mama up!" Or see us having races around the back yard (he already knows to kneel down for "on your mark, get set, go!" where I can sprint and sweat and feel instantly better.  Or doing burpees together, which he totally cannot do yet but seems to think are hilarious. My kid is incredibly physical and loves all this. We play hard and then we laugh hard. We fall down a lot, we get back up and we keep going. And man does that kid take good naps.

Incidentally, this is no small reason that I get questions all the time about how I've gotten my arms to be so toned and muscular, much more so than when I was younger and working out regularly.  "Parenting," I say. "Just parenting." Toddler workouts are no joke.

So even though the days are long around here, even though we are going on a full year since the tantrums started, even though it doesn't always work, I am thankful for such a beautiful fun-loving, son, for the willingness to keep learning about myself and make changes where I must to parent him better even as I attempt to take care of myself more fully than I did my first time around with this parenting thing.

And seriously, my deltoids? Things of beauty now. There's always a silver lining, friends.

Watching Goodbye

There is nothing, nothing, that can prepare you to watch someone say goodbye to her child.

No amount of training or imaginings or books about loss or stories of fellow adoptive parents or birthparents can come close.

A year and a half ago, this all felt different. We knew about our son's birth mom, heard about her pain, her sadness, even in the midst of certainty of her decision. But we didn't actually know her. We hadn't hugged her or seen a picture of her. We didn't know what her voice sounded like or how wide her smile was. We didn't know why she made this choice.

Now we know.

And while I'm overwhelmingly glad to know these things, to have these mysteries solved, I also sometimes miss the ignorance.

Because in the ignorance, I could not feel her pain.

In the ignorance, she was just a member of the "adoption triad", someone we treasured in spirit, whose courage and bravery we honored. But she was not particularly real to me or to my son. Intangible, somehow.

And with the new tangibility comes new pain for all of us.

To sit across from a woman who looks you in the eye and thanks you for loving her sons. To watch her glance down at the baby in her arms and hold him tight, unsure if she will ever choose to see him again, if it would be too painful to answer his questions. To hear her whisper words of love and heartache and watch a tear fall, landing on his little hands before she hands him to you to take home.

This is to see pain at its deepest.

So maybe I've been a little quieter about this adoption. Maybe there has been a little more of the bitter than the sweet in these early weeks because I cannot remove that image of mother and son in the moment of goodbye. I don't think I ever will, nor should I. I pray that it will, in the hardest moments of parenting him, remind me of her deepest sacrifice, her hardest choices, her unfathomable pain- and my deep, humbling privilege in calling him "son" alongside her.

And sometimes I think "Is that what God's face looked like? When he said goodbye to Jesus? Was it that mixture of deep anguish and hope that I saw on her face? Is what she is feeling a small taste of God's own huge sacrifice?"

I can't ever know but it makes me pause this time around with the enormity of what adoption means.

And, in the pausing, thank God that, despite all the pain, he has brought us all together- the beautiful woman, her precious sons - our family, that looks more beautiful than we could ever imagine but that will also have deep scars underneath the beauty. Scars of goodbye and loss and grief.

Sometimes in the church we like to paint adoption with rainbows and unicorns, but this is hard stuff, friends. Deep, soul wrenching choices that last a lifetime.

So while I treasure the coos and the first smiles and the sweetness of his big brothers holding his hand or kissing him gently on the head, I treasure it with the knowledge that their first mother is missing it. And while we cuddle him and teach him to call us mom and dad, she waits for texts and pictures, living in the reality of life after loss, her arms empty of that little boy she cuddled not even two months ago.

I am grateful for God's comfort and hope on the days when her loss feels bigger than my joy.