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!