A little blog I wrote on the way home...

(This was from January 6th, 2012)

The end of the beginning…

Our journey to adoption has finally ended, and we are now officially on our next journey: parenthood.  As I sit here in the Tokyo airport awaiting our flight to Chicago, then on to Nashville where we will introduce our daughter to waiting family and friends, I realize that now the road to adoption is over.  Now begins the daunting task of raising a godly, loving, excited-about-life daughter.  I must confess that I feel ill-prepared and tired just thinking of it.  The past nine days have been some of the most challenging of my life.  It’s funny really, because they have also been some of the happiest.  We got to pick up Amber Joy on New Year’s Eve in Taitung, Taiwan.  We were excited, nervous, anxious, happy, and so many other emotions, I can’t even explain.  It’s one thing to be first time parents…it is entirely another to be first time parents halfway around the world from your friends and family.  A foreign country where no one speaks your language, at least not very well, can make me anxious on its own, but the fact that this was my first international trip altogether has my head reeling.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Aunt Stephanie's Favorite Weather

Image
Let me do some explaining about the weather in the highlands of PNG. We refer to it as eternal spring, and there is a lot to that definition. When you think ‘spring,’ what comes to mind? Flowers? Birds? Baby animals? BUT, if you live in the northern part of the northern hemisphere, maybe spring means something different: ice/snow that comes out of nowhere, buckets of rain, gloomy skies, mud. Here in PNG, ‘spring’ is marked with the end of rainy season—“wet” time--  (nobody really knows when it begins or ends, so it’s just a guess), and we say it’s the beginning of the “less wet” time of year. The temperature doesn’t change much, year-round. It’s typically 60’s at night and 80’s in the daytime. It can get hot and humid, but because we’re in the mountains, there’s no need for central a/c or heat. It’s rather pleasant most of the time. Most people who hear this say something like, “Oh, I would love that!” I have to say, after the time we’ve spent here, especially not leaving the count
Read more

46 years, 364 days

Image
 Tomorrow, I will turn 47. That means that today, I’ve been in this world for 17,154 days. That’s a long time to have already lived. I was telling Justin this morning that in the past, on the day before my birthday, I usually would think about the things I haven’t done: The changes unmade, the pounds undropped, the relationships unforged. I’ve always been pretty hard on myself. I expect a lot of myself, but I also see (glaringly) where I fall short of my own unrealistic expectations. But finally, gently, year by year, grace is breaking through. The same grace I try to extend to others in my life is beginning to take root in my daily existence. I could sit here tonight and write about all that I’m not, all that I haven’t accomplished, and all that I don’t do. But as I scoot closer to 50 than to 40, I’ve decided that I’m going to celebrate. I’m going to celebrate the moments, the people, the real, the grit, the pain, and the soul-deep JOY that life is. There’s something sobering about re
Read more

The Power of Shared Experience

Image
When I worked as a hospital and hospice chaplain, one of the lessons I learned was the power of sharing an experience, joyful or sorrowful, with another. Life experiences can inextricably tie us to those faces we see in our memories. I remember one family in particular, whose daughter was a pediatric hospice patient. We worked as a team: doctor, nurse, chaplain, social worker, nurse tech (to help with bathing and toileting). We often made visits to this family, both individually and together, through the months she fought for her life. We shared with each other about the difficulties the family faced, and we also leaned on each other when the grief was heavy. You see, home hospice is a very unique place to minister and serve. As a member of the hospice care team, I was ‘assigned’ to a family who had recently been referred to hospice. Most of our patients and their families were served in their homes. We were invited into living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms of our patients. Their
Read more