Six Month Baby Update

Our Little Guy is six months old today! He's doing great--rolling around, almost sitting up, looking scarily close to crawling, laughing and smiling and getting to be very social. Paul, who's staying home with him during the school year, hears "da-da", he is sure. I, in futility, encourage "ma-ma".  He doesn't sleep through the night yet, though people keep promising us he will once we start giving him solid food (any day now). We are skeptical! He's teething and drooling and we love him a ton!

As many of you know, we had intended to adopt our son, then things got complicated ("Supposed to Be"), then God intervened ("Unless God" ) and we were asked to foster Little Man as we waited to see what would happen with the biological parents. We still do not know the outcome for sure, but it is looking like we will get to adopt him. While we are thrilled, our joy is tinged with sadness.

We have always wanted a child and we love our son. We want him to stay with us and be a part of our family forever. However, we know that our desire has a cost to our baby. He has a complicated story. He may not be able to understand it for many, many years, and while he will know (we pray every day) how much we love him, he will also have to come to terms with the loss of his first family. The reality is that his biological parents, due to both circumstances and choice, cannot currently parent him.

Adoption is beautiful, but in a perfect world, it would not exist. As a Christian, I believe that I have been adopted, through Jesus, into God's family, and I am grateful and amazed at this privilege. As I was thinking, I realized that, even for God, there is a sense that adoption was not the first choice. If Adam and Eve had not sinned, they would have been still in God's family as it was originally designed. However, due to the fall, Jesus came so that we could be adopted into God's family. Adoption always has a cost.

We believe that our guy was placed with us by design, and we are grateful. We pray daily for wisdom to parent him well and with love, and we pray for his biological parents as well, and hope that he will have a future relationship with them. We pray most of all that he will also experience the joy of adoption into God's family, and that the Lord will heal his heart and turn his pain into beauty and purpose.

In further news: We are approved by our adoption agency for two children, and are praying that God would bring us a sibling for our little man. Private adoption is costly, and we recently received a grant from Pure Gift from God, who will match our funds dollar for dollar up to $4000--so if we raise $2000, they will give us $2000 more. If you are interested in helping out, here is the link:  Paul and Edna's Adoption Odyssey

MWF misses BFFs (and Parenthood)

In a week I will have been married for seven months. I love my husband and I love being married (though we are still figuring lots of things out). What I don't love is living eight hours away from my closest friends. People warned me that marriage as an "older" person (over forty) would be challenging. I don't think marriage has been any more challenging as a fortysomething, because I think that the annoyance of compromising and doing things differently after having done them another way for years is balanced out by the continuing wonderment of finally having found someone (and the reality that my husband has been the one compromising the most). 

What has been challenging is friendship. Getting married after forty--piece of cake. Finding friends after forty? Really difficult. Most people in my demographic have their friends already. They are nice enough, but all the friendship slots are filled. Plus, I have friends who go back fifteen, twenty, even thirty years. They know my history. I don't have to explain the backstory. To start over again with someone new is daunting.

There are times I don't miss my friends as much. I have work, a new marriage, and house-hunting. But then there are weeks when I cry at everything. One TV show that I have watched for its duration is "Parenthood". The last episode was a few weeks ago, and at the end, I bawled. Over TV. I started thinking about why I was sad. The reason I liked "Parenthood" in the first place was because it was about a family which was also a community. They knew each other, they talked to each other, they had traditions, they loved each other. I'm sure I would have been teary in Missouri as well, but here in Ohio, with my friends miles away, it felt like losing more people in my circle and losing another familiar set of people whom I saw every Thursday night. 

The name of my blog, yet again and probably always, comes back to haunt me. I want friends and community because that is the way that God has created me (and how He created all of us, I believe). Yet, once again, I can't have what I want quickly. Even if I met my new best friend tomorrow, she wouldn't feel like my old best friend until time has passed. My husband was praying for me last week, asking the Lord to help me to use this loneliness to draw closer to Him. At the time, I was having none of it. Somehow it seems I already lived that. I think it was being single all those years that helped deepen my relationship to the Lord. Wasn't that enough? My attitude: "I don't want God. I want friends."

Apparently I'm a slow, slow learner. I was in St. Louis this past weekend, and visited the church I had been attending the year before I got married, The Summit. One of the reasons I started going there was because almost every message reminded me that Jesus meets all of our needs, and that whenever we are feeling anxious, or upset, or fearful, it's usually because we have put something else in place of Jesus and fear losing it. Sunday I was confronted with this again. The message discussed the Song of Solomon, sex, and marital oneness, but at one point the pastor reiterated how the most intimate relationship of our heart is with Jesus. Converging with this thought were several conversations with friends in which I discovered that they too, though living in the same place they had always lived, were feeling lonely and disconnected. Maybe all of us experience these moments even without moving to a new state. 

I don't have an answer for how to find friends (though one of my Missouri girls loaned me "MWF Seeking BFF" and it's been a great read). However, I have repented of my "Who needs God, I want friends" attitude and am trying to accept the reality that one of the happiest times of my life also contains some of the saddest moments. I was single a long (very long) time, and yet finally met my husband. I may not have close friends in Ohio for a long (hopefully not that long) time. But even if not, I can continue to trust that God will meet my needs. The verse that strengthened me through those years of singleness still applies: 

The Lord will accomplish what concerns me;Your lovingkindness, O Lord, is everlasting;Do not forsake the works of Your hands. (Psalm 138:8)

God is at work. I am still waiting.