Thoughts on How I Got Here

This post is born out of a letter I was writing a while ago. I was suppose to be writing about some of the things that had been going on in our lives recently and I stopped when I discovered I'd been rambling for a long time about something I was struggling with and dealing with in my head. Anyway, I decided its former location was not the correct medium for these thoughts so I relocated it here. I'm afraid most of the people I'd like to read it won't see it here but oh well, here it is anyway in its slightly edited form...

I’m not entirely sure why this is happening (probably because I have so much to learn) but in the past few months I’ve had a number of occasions to recall and recount the story of my life thus far and I have discovered a lot of things through those experiences. Don’t worry, I’m not going to dwell on all of the lessons here but there is one that I feel compelled to end this letter with post here. I found as I told my story that I (at least in hindsight or maybe just to myself) seemed to be coming across as arrogant or condescending or something as I talked about how I got to where I am. I spoke of how I “felt called into ministry” or how I needed to do something “bigger than myself”. I found myself at one point talking to a guy just starting college of how it was noble for me to drop out of college, and another time I was talking to a contractor about how I left my job in construction with a great company to follow a “higher calling”. Even the first part of his letter could come across as me thinking of myself as somehow more important or more “noble” because of where I'm employed. I’m pretty sure this isn’t really how I feel, and if it is then I've got a fall coming my way, but it feels like it is how I can come across sometimes and as I’m beginning to see this, I can tell that it is mostly weakness or foolishness or confusion that has led me to where I am. I couldn’t see the ministry I was called to until I was in a place where it was my only choice. I have been raised (directly and indirectly) by people who were so deeply invested in “full time ministry” and they did things like fixing book-binding machines,or caring for sick people, or fixing cars or making tools and dies (whatever that means) or raising kids, but what they were really doing was investing themselves in other people including me. I thank God for all of you who do “full time ministry” without having the assuming, often presumptuous, title or position to hide behind. I believe what I'm doing is important and I'm glad I'm here and I am grateful that I get to do what I'm doing but I also believe that it isn't more important or more nobel or more honorable then what I was doing before or could be doing or will be doing in the future. I think the thing that makes something, anything, honorable or nobel or important is the motivation behind it and the attitude and vision it's done with. All I’m really trying to say is that I want to live the story I'm living well. I want to live it for the people around me and live it with passion and vision to see that I'm on the fringes of some huge work that God is doing and, weather I'm working with inner city kids or African kids, or building nursing homes or if I'm unemployed all together, I want to be doing what God is doing and I believe that what God's doing is bringing healing to brokenness, hope to despair, freedom to captivity, and forgiveness and grace to ... everyone! I don't know about you, but I can't think of anything more important then that and there is no occupation with a monopoly on that work!

Throwing Stones

I guess its been something like 4 months since I've blogged but its been busy so that's just the way it goes sometimes. Now that camp is a recent memory and the change in seasons is right around the corner again, I'll hopefully be writing a little more regularly. It can't really get any less regular, so that's encouraging!

Anyway, here goes. Attempt at blogging, take two.

Izaac and I went hiking the other day and I can hardly convey how excited I am about that! I have been waiting for something like 3 years to go hiking with my son and the best part is that he asked to go and loved being out on the trail and I can't think of anything better in the world then that! I get the impression, however, that he isn't picturing exactly the same thing as I am when he talks about hiking. This first became apparent when he said he wanted to "go hiking in the car". You mean you want to go in the car to go hiking? "No, I want to hike in the car". I'm not quite sure how that works. Its a bit more confined then I usually like, but then he is still pretty small so maybe it works for him. The second apparent divergence in our view of this recreational past time became obvious once we got to the trail head.

There's this place not to far from our house called McConnell's Mill State Park. It has quickly become one of my favorite places on earth. To get there you drive through all of this hilly, rolling farm land, take a sharp turn onto a steep decent and find yourself in a thickly wooded gorge full of massive rock outcroppings etched down the middle by the winding, picturesque Slippery Rock Creek. There are miles of trails that follow up and down the river and it is about as close to wilderness adventuring as I have much chance to get at this point in my life.

Anyway, Izaac and I get there, do a little "hiking in the car", which mostly looked to me like jumping back and forth over the back seat, and climbed down the make-shift stairs cut into the side of the ravine that leeds to the creek. As soon as we get far enough down to see the water through the trees, Izaac, almost frantic with excitement, starts begging to go throw stones. This isn't anything new to me. The most entertaining thing in the world for a two year old boy is, apparently, throwing anything with mass into anything liquid. So, we tossed a few stones and then I managed to convince him that we should walk for a while. With his attention temporarily bouncing manically between sticks and bugs and leaves and all manor of other amazingly curious things, we made it a ways down the trail before he stumbled (literally, in fact) upon a stone that absolutely, beyond any doubt and despite all reason, had to be thrown into, or at least toward, the quietly running stream. And of course, just like potato chips, one is never enough. Ten minutes later, I pried his suddenly vice-like attention off of his endless, yet exhilarating task and back onto the trail. As you might imagine, this scene repeated it self over and over until I finally gave up on my completely realistic ambition of hiking the six miles to my favorite spot to share some quite reflection and deep conversation with my two year old.

At that point I decided to dive whole-heartedly and passionately into my son's vision of what hiking should be. We found the rockiest place right on the creek so we could throw stones and get wet and yell hello to kayakers and go nowhere and never reach any other "destination". In the end, we did very little "hiking" but we threw a lot of stones and had a ton of fun and, really, is walking down a trail and then turning around and walking back that much more beneficial then throwing stones?

As always, I can't help but see this as a metaphor, as I believe a lot of experiences in life are, and try to learn something. I think more often then not, I find myself trying hard to hike when all I should be doing is throwing stones. Of course there is nothing wrong with hiking, but at times the choice between two good things comes down to which one will serve better to build and grow and deepen my relationships with the people around me. I'd love to go hiking, but if you'd rather throw stones, I'm right there with you.

it's been awhile

So it has been a really long time since we have written anything on here. I just wasn't sure what to say. We were so excited to adopt and we were sharing the news with everyone. Then who would have thought (not me) that we would get pregnant! So we are now super excited and sharing with the world that we are going to have a baby! The due date right now is November 5th! My next doctor appointment is June 15th and then we will schedule an ultrasound shortly after that! We are excited to find out what we are having (we will be sharing with everyone) and to make sure our due date is still correct. I am planning to have a VBAC and the doctors sound like I am a good candidate for it. We will do another c-section if we have to but at this point we really are hoping that wont be the case.  We will try to keep you all much more updated from now on.  Feel free to email or facebook or comment if you would like any more information or to yell at us for not posting often enough!

"Coincidental" Happenings?

Today I met a man named Sam Childers. Chances are there aren't too many (if anyone) reading this who know that name. Heck, I didn't until a month or two ago, and honestly I can't remember how I first heard it.

All around the same time a few things happened if I remember right. I saw an obscure movie preview for a flick that got almost no media attention and was almost entirely un-promoted in this country. Then a book showed up on the "other books that might interest you" page on my Amazon.com account and I feel like someone also told me to check this book out. So anyway, I got the book and read it in about two days. The story in those pages caught me in an interesting way. As I read it, something, almost everything, in me wanted to write it off as crazy or inflated or just plain made-up. This is one of those larger then life stories that seems too big to be real. But the guys voice comes through in the words and there was nothing about it that felt like he was trying to convince anyone of this stuff. I didn't feel like he cared one bit if anyone bought it (the story or the book) and that made me think that it must be true and in that case God must be right at the center of it. The next thing I felt was frustrated and sort of conflicted. The story challenged a lot of how I thought about God working in the world. I have had to give a lot of thought to this stuff and I've come to some conclusions and I'm still working on some. However, in an effort to prevent sucking you unwillingly into a meeting of my one man book club, I'm not going to share my thoughts and opinions on the details of this book right now.

So, to carry on with my story: like I said, this all took place a little while back. A few weeks after I finished the book, although some of the questions that it had inspired were still bouncing around somewhere in the vast emptiness of my mind, I had mostly moved on from it and, due to the not so uncommon event of a camp vehicle breakdown 3 hours away, I found myself driving back toward home on a secondary road (also due to a not so uncommon event: the failure of our GPS to locate roads that actually exist). As we headed back a sign that said "Angels of East Africa" caught the corner of my eye. We had completely by accident found the headquarters of the mission started by the man who's memoir had caused some turmoil in my easily unsettled mind. However, due to my complete lack of boldness and fear of meeting new people, I kept right on driving thinking it an odd coincidence and a little perturbed that this thing was somehow haunting me. Needless to say, I wrote it off again. (I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking it so I may as well voice it: I am really slow on the uptake!)

Now this brings us to today. Most of us from the camp have been away at a CCCA gathering (Christian Camp and Conference Association) and were headed home this afternoon. Again, due to GPS confusion, we found ourselves searching for a Starbucks and a way to get on the turnpike and again that sign caught my eye. This time my timidity was overruled by the others in the vehicle and we pulled into the gravel parking lot of this building that looked like it could be a gun shop.  We went in a chatted a little with the people manning the desks and they told us we should stop by the church that this larger-then-life preacher man had started.  So, again despite me, that's what we did. When we got there we were meet by this inevitably really busy man who sat and talked with us for more then a half hour without any indication that we were holding him up from more pressing business or making him late for some undoubtedly important appointment. We talked a lot about the work he's doing and a little about ours and I have no idea why all of this has happened the way it has and I can't even speculate what may come of it someday but it all just leaves me with the feeling that God is doing something and there are whispers of Africa in it and those sounds tend to make my heart start to speed up just a little!

I wanted to tell this story mostly because this blog serves as my journal and, as I've said, helps me process, but also because I'd love some feed back. Check this guy and his story out. Look up Sam Childers or "Machine Gun Preacher" on Youtube or, better yet, read his memoir, Another Mans War, and let me know your thoughts and feelings about it (especially if you happen to be reading this from Uganda or some such place). Pull up a chair and join my book club. The discussion is rather flat and one sided with the current membership at one.

Izaac

So this is my (Christina) first post and I am sure you will be able to tell because our writing styles are different. I usually make Benj do all the writing because I think it is better and more interesting to read. Anyway, here I go...

I thought I would give an update on how Izaac is doing. He just had his two year check up and everything looks good! He weighs 25.3 pounds, which puts him in the 12th percentile and 34 inches, which puts him in the 30th percentile. His head is 49.5 cm, but didn't tell me what percentile that was. He did a great job even when it was time for a shot. He said ouch and cried for a second but as soon as I mentioned a sucker he stopped! We have been trying to potty train and he has been doing a great job at home, but when he is in the nursery he refuses to tell his teachers he has to go. I am hoping that he will start to tell them soon. Izaac loves reading, coloring, playing play-doh, working at his "workshop", and watching Mickey Mouse Club House. Lately when he wakes up in the morning he is quiet so I can't hear him and he unloads all his clothes out of there bins so he can stack them up to reach higher on his toy shelves. We bought he a step stool so that he would stop unloading them and the next day he unloaded the closet instead. I just never know what his room is going to look like each morning!

I have been asking him if he wants a baby brother or baby sister and he usually picks baby sister! I don't really think he understands what I am asking but it is fun to see what he decides each day.

Here is the Info (For real this time)

Alright, lets see if I can stay on track this time! If you haven't picked up on it yet, Christina and I are adopting a child! We are working with Bethany Christian Services and are adopting an infant from somewhere in the USA. There you go. You now know just about as much as we do...

Okay, I guess I can't really just post that so I'll keep going for a while. This is not a new calling for us but we've finally wrestled up the courage and faith to take the first few steps. I always assumed that when we began adopting it would be internationally. I figured we would be planning to welcome a Ugandan child into our family (and into our Ugandan house), and I still believe we will someday, but it has been made pretty clear to us that, for now, this is what we are suppose to be doing and we are excited about it, really excited about it! Right now we are surrounded by people with adoption experience from a variety of different angles. We are surrounded by support and experience and that has been, and will be, such a blessing throughout this whole process.

So we just sent in the majority of our paperwork yesterday (sincere apologies to the South American rain forest that was sacrificed to make that happen) and are still waiting for our clearances to come back and say that we aren't serial killers or that we never voted with the Green Party or something. I'm not really sure what they are checking for but I am glad they check and don't just give babies to anyone. Once all our paperwork is in, we will have to meet with our case worker a couple times. She'll come to our house to make sure we don't live in a cardboard box (it isn't exactly a cardboard box, we should be okay) and we'll go see her at her office to make sure she isn't selling kids out of the back of a run down Laundromat. (I hate that I'm always so sarcastic. Note to self: work on that) After all that is done, we will finally be placed on the waiting list!! During that time, the first thing we have to do is make a "profile book" that Bethany will show to birth moms so they can get a feel for who we are and hopefully choose us. Also, there is this little detail about raising a bunch of money. We know there will be emotional ups and downs, truthfully there already have been. We can see these hills and valleys as we pray and hope and work for the money to make this happen without seeing any possibility of it coming through, as we see God work out His plan beyond anything we can ask or imagine, as we get calls telling us that a birth mom is looking at our profile and then that she didn't choose us, as we wait and wait and wait. We ask for your prayers and support during this time. We'll ask for more later but for now please just pray with us, pray for us, pray for the birth mother of our child, I don't know her story but this may very well be the hardest thing she will ever do, pray for the child that is directly in the eye of this whirlwind, and, above all else, pray that God would be glorified and His kingdom built a little bigger here, on earth, as it is in heaven (where everyone is an adopted child!).

Adoption!

This, to be entirely honest (which is a life skill I'm working on (that and using parenthesis less often)), is probably the real reason we started this blog. Before we even got married, Christina and I talked a lot about adoption. I know that in a perfect world, in the world God had in mind when he breathed into dirt that one day, He didn't intend for adoption to be part of the plan. Adoption became necessary only after the fall but the cool thing is that it was God's solution to the fall. When everything got messed up and broken and we found ourselves lost in the universe, alone and hopeless, God decided to sit down, fill out paperwork for like two months straight, send money to a bunch of agencies that probably have real names with real words but that settle for  a bunch of capitol letters, and adopt us into His family(Okay, I guess God did it before all the paper work and those other things). And now, because stuff is still messed up, we can take part in that solution too.

So, right now at least, the thing that runs through my mind like whitewater is the nearly-invisible, all but insignificant stories that are on a collision course at this exact moment. Maybe somewhere there is a woman, maybe still a girl really, who is about to give in. Maybe the deck has been stacked and the hand she's been dealt couldn't be more unfair. Maybe she just wants someone to look at her and see her, really see her, and be drawn to something deep and real but the way she's trying to find that is killing her. Then somewhere near her is a guy. Maybe this guy has traveled a hard road to get where he is and maybe it has left him scarred and bruised. Maybe he just wants to be a man and he thinks he knows what that means but the truth is he has no clue. Sometime in the future a baby is going to be born and then be passed from one set of hands to another and maybe that transition will cause questions and struggles and confusion for that baby when he's not a baby anymore. Somewhere tonight there is another boy sitting up late punching away at keys on a keyboard desperately hoping that the words that result will produce some kind of rhythm, like the pounding of tribal drums, that would signal his coming of age into the man who is bold and certain and equipped for the challenges staring him in the face. Somewhere near this boy is a girl who is passionate and knows that the thing she was designed for, the thing that she longs for is to love a child. Just like the God who made her, the very soul of her wants to care for and nurture and love those who have nothing to offer in return. And somewhere (sound asleep in the next room) is a little boy who (much like me) has almost no idea what all is going on and how much his life is about to change. The truth is I really have almost no idea about all of the things being affected by all of this or how and what lead up to it all from so many different places, but I do know the ripples will keep spreading outward and, now, even you're rocking a little bit with the movement in the water.

Its weird to think about all of this. One of my favorite authors is always talking about how we're all telling stories with our lives, and I think that is a really good way to look at it. But, to me, it seems like  the stories are pretty boring and pointless until they start to overlap and then the depth that's created is beautiful and thats when it starts to mean something. This post was supposed to be about our adoption process. I had intended to give you all the details of where we're at with the paperwork and our next couple steps and ask you to start getting involved with us and stuff like that, but I guess I sort of got off track. I'm going to have to leave the important informational stuff up to Christina and I'll stick to the flowery, spacey, irrelevant thoughts that I like to write. And on that note, here's one more before I sign off. I think the conclusion I just came to is this: adoption, like birth or marriage or church or joining a biker gang, is God giving us overlap. It is God's way of giving our stories depth and color and beauty, but it's also, in a different way then those other things, God's way of allowing us into His heart to share in His work of redeeming the broken places and making things whole again. As scared and uncertain and unqualified as I am, I'm pretty stoked be a part of that!   

Overcoming Static Friction

I once read somewhere that with faith the size of a mustered seed you could move a mountain into an ocean. Well, I pray often that my faith will grow that big, but for now I'm practicing my microscopic faith by moving much smaller things into much shallower water (well, just into mud really). Recently we've taken to moving buildings here at Pine Valley. How all of this came about is a bit of a long story and thats not really what this post is about. Here are the details you do need so I can make my point: a church in town started to add a gym onto their building and were unable to finish it so they donated it to us. The building is big, really big and there is a lot of materiel and its heavy. So now we have this 60' by 100' building that is standing some five or six miles from our property and we need to get it here. As I thought about this project, mostly after the fact, the thing that struck me is that movement is hard work and also buildings are heavy. The thing about movement though is that the initial energy is the most important, most difficult part. Once you achieve forward momentum, keeping it is a little less of a struggle. This became clearly evident in trying to slide a pile of 60' long trusses weighing in at over 22,000 lbs. Again though, that really isn't the point.

I think if you want to learn some things about life, the best thing to do is look around you. A lot of things are metaphors for bigger and deeper things if you allow them to be.

The first step is the hardest one. The effort it takes to get up off the couch can feel exhausting. Reaching up for that first hand-hold and pulling your feet away from the ground is always the toughest. Breaking the static friction is what gets anybody anywhere. Its what got us out here to western PA, its what got us into this great adventure of adoption (much, much more on that to come soon!) and it is what will take us head long into whatever God has in store for us next if we are willing to tighten up our shoe laces, put our shoulders down, and push hard into the next first step.          

The Start

So we're writing a blog. The jaded, cynical part of me has put this off for a long time because I know there are far more blogs then there are people who actually want to read blogs. Also, I can't help feeling that it might be sort of arrogant of me to assume I have something new and important to say to the universe, which is what I feel like I should have if I'm going to publish it on the internet. I've always been of the opinion that the majority of what takes place on the internet is man standing in the wilderness, looking out into eternity and screaming at the top of his lungs "I exist", and expecting the universe to notice and respond. Anyway, despite these nagging feelings, I decided to start this thing anyway.

On an airplane about 8 years ago, at some crazy hight above the massive expanse of the Atlantic ocean, I started writing a journal. It was the first one I had ever written (and the last) and, unfortunately, a number of years later, on a flight headed in the opposite directing, I left that journal in the seat back pouch of a KLM Royal Dutch 747. I'm sure it is now in some landfill in the Netherlands buried under a hundred feet of discarded wooden shoes, broken windmills and whatever else they throw away in Holland. All of this is completely irrelevant except to say that even though no one else ever cracked the cover of that knock off Mole Skin, almost elegant looking, little black journal, it was good for me. It helped me process and work through the things that happen to me, through me and around me and that's what I am hoping for here. Christina and I want to share the things, the extraordinary things hidden in the mundane things, but, also we need to process and think through these things. So here we go! Feel free to come along if you'd like, or just stop in from time to time, or ignore it altogether if you want, but anyway, here we go.