Go Again

We stand in line at the grocery store like clockwork. It’s Friday. The cashiers know my family and my children know them by name. Miss Misty is having a baby. Eden called it months before it was obvious and I hushed her in fear that she’d engaged in the taboo question all children have a hard time containing. Mr. Ty’s daddy just died. Caleb prayed for him to be healed nearly every day since he’d told us, but Mr. Ty’s heart seemed to be healed in the meantime. “I believe in God, now,” he tells them as he weighs my cucumbers. Miss Sata has a new hairstyle, again, and Mr. Roger still isn’t quite sure my groceries will fit in the oversized bag I tote every week.

Just like at home, I forget we are different when we are there. We may have been”different” to each one of them, when they first met us, but now the normal we live everyday is just as normal to the man re-stocking the produce each week as we scoot our cart passed him.

But one week, our cashier was new and curious and demonstrative. The groceries slowed to a halt  on the belt and his face flushed, red, as he gushed about them and gave kudos to me. “Wow, it’s so amazing what you’ve done.”

Adoptive mamas alike share the same discomfort with comments like this, but this particular one struck a new, strained, chord.

This week, when the window shades were pulled, I had been far from amazing.

Tired at best. I hid behind my bedroom door and cried, exhausted. Was it always going to be this hard? I’d run bone dry — out of those tender, patient words with a long-suffering tone, and this particular child pushed away every movement I’d made towards love. It was as if every one of her actions was purposed to say: “I’m going to make it impossible for you to love me. I’m waiting for you to fail me. Prove to me I’m not worth it.”

And fail her I did.

She needed steady and I reacted. How many times will this child resist my advancements towards her heart? In my fearful expectations, I inhaled her years of fatherlessness like it was a death sentence. Albeit subtle — all in my head — she read me, of course; a child, once orphaned, becomes an expert at detecting a weak-link of love. They prepare to flee at the first indication that love might fall short.

Hearts bleed in my home in different intervals, but at any given moment one or another is reminding me that we aren’t exactly re-creating normal. I press my hand against the wound and it hemorrhages and I wonder if we’ll ever stop bleeding out old blood.

What a perfect storm. The recovering perfectionist fails and the child backs away further. Who wouldn’t fail this child who’s fiercely resisting my love? I argue to myself. She waits expectantly for her history to repeat itself and I fight feeling trapped by her expectations.

On days like these, while you cry behind the shades pulled tight and your neighbors are shouting out accolades, the YouTube video of the beautiful moment when they found themselves wrapped in your arms is not enough to sustain you. Those of us who have saidyes to the wounded child   — or even if you just happened to find yourself raising one — need a grid for their very worst days.

He gave it. In words, once. In expression, all throughout history.

Go again.*

He told the man, Hosea, who married a harlot that couldn’t leave her darkly-patterned ways. What a life calling. How do you explain this to your mother and father, whose dreams for you surely stretched well beyond welcoming a stained bride who still hasn’t decided yet if she is staying?

His words to me are in kind. Look deeply into those eyes that are like vacant corridors and hold her again. Let her forehead feel your lips. Scratch her back and tickle her belly and tell her — again — that she’s yours … forever. Call forth from what is not, what will one-day be. “…just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel” (Hosea 3:1).

You see, friends, she (any one of the “she”s in my home on a given day) is only my greatest challenge if I believe that my eighty-something years on earth were intended for me only to know safe love — the world’s version of love. If I am to receive and live a love that has a known a shape and form that doesn’t bend or break or bleed, then she’s a real problem. A hindrance.

But His love isn’t plastic.

And He said about me what He is saying to me about her.

Go again.

So I go, again, to her — not because I have some stalwart strength that needs recognition from a grocery store cashier, but because I want to invest my life in knowing the “other-than” love of the Father that outlies every one of my natural understandings of Him.

It’s not my resolve that equips me. My knees are busted open and blood-shod from falling in my pursuit of her heart. But in my weakest moments, I can know this love. Because of my weakest moments, I can know this love.

The most beautiful part of my story these days is bloody.

A friend recently stared into the eyes of her daughter, adopted at an older age and bristling — hard — against her love, and said tenderly, “Babe, you’re going to call me your best friend one day.”

That’s His love that goes again.

Going again is looking into that dead-pan expression and saying it’s not about how far gone you are [the lie they’ve listened to all their lives], it’s about how far He is willing to go to retrieve you. 

I won’t come by this love naturally. It’s not natural for those of us clothed in flesh to lean in, not back, when pushed away. The real life-blood of God courses through my system when I resist the urge to divorce my heart from the battle for hers and, instead, go again.

It’s in the going again that we wear the cross and find out from experience what we know in Word, that that tree was more about life than death. Though death was required.

The person in our lives most challenging to love — the child in our home or the friend down the street or even our blood-kin — is the instrument for bringing us to the end of that plastic kind of love and the beginning of our own personal revelation of the cross as a doorway, not just a destination.

He’s aptly positioned them so we might have a place where we get to be the rare ones on the earth who share His heart — the heart that goes again.

They aren’t our greatest challenge, friends. They are our greatest asset.

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Making it Practical for those in and outside of adoption: If your love for the one under your roof has run dry, start the line of prayer with yourself: Father, where I am putting up walls to Your love? Where am I not receiving You? Though maybe not connected by blood, this child was given to you for more than just their own heart’s redemption. Every one of their challenges is tied to something He is also doing in your heart. Resist the urge to divorce them in your heart and ask Him to reveal the layers in you that need to know Him as the Father who goes again.

Spend time meditating in the gospels on the cross. Smell the blood and sweat against that wood. Ask Him to make His Word alive in your experience.

And put what He shows you into action. Slide away from the screen, pad your way down the hall to her bedroom, and wrap your arms around her, tight. Ask Him on the way “How do You see her?” and tell her what He shows you. Make it a habit: hug her as many times as you feed her. Give her His words about her, not just your observations. Let them become her true food.

Go again.

*For Your Continued Pursuit: Hosea 3:1 | Hosea 2:14-15, 19-20, 23 | Hosea 6:3 | 1 Corinthians 13:-10 | 1 Corinthians 1:18-19 | Galatians 6:14 | Hebrews 12:1-2 | Matthew 10:38-39 | Colossians 3:2-3

First, fourth, fifth and sixth photos compliments of Mandie Joy. Second and third photos compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography. Last photo compliments of Photography by Kamarah.

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Sara Hagerty

Sara is a wife to Nate and a mother of five whose birth canal bridged the expanse between the United States and Africa. After almost a decade of Christian life she was introduced to pain and perplexity and, ultimately, intimacy with Jesus. God met her and moved her when life stopped working. And out of the overflow of this perplexity, came her writing.You can read more of her writing at Every Bitter Thing is Sweet.

Adopting Outside the Birth Order

“Sometimes what we call ‘wisdom’ is actually fear,” she said, casually, but carefully in response to the story I’d just told her.

Searing truth.

We’d been parents for under two years. We’d just begun to hit a stride with Eden and Caleb when we felt the nudge to say ‘yes’ to yet another paper pregnancy. We suspected it would be two, but felt for sure it would be children who were the same age or younger as our two now. “The paint is still too fresh on the walls,” Nate said when I told him about the older girl lingering around the orphan babies with new stories emerging, often overlooked. She haunted my waking hours. “Later, we’ll adopt an older girl,” was his response.

I agreed. The thing I wanted most was actually the thing I feared most.

Isn’t that how it always is? Fear forms a hedge around our greatest calling.

But then, through a circuitous series of events –one that, in retrospect, was the undeniably kind and gentle way of the Father, we learned about her.

Nate’s heart changed. “We have to go after her, Sara” he said one morning.

Somewhere deep down I knew he was right, but my mind made a case otherwise. Fear wore the guise of reason.

And when I recounted to my friend, that afternoon over tea, all the reasons why adopting an older child, alongside another and outside of the birth order, at this time just didn’t feel wise, she spoke truth.

I had article after article and hours of classwork to back up my case. And, friends, I am a researcher by nature so my intent in this post is not to blow the research out of the water, but it’s to point to a Man who, at times, trumps both research and reason.
God builds the family.
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“I need to do what Lily does, Daddy,” she said. It was the first morning we saw significant progress in an issue on which we’d focused heavy attention, prayer and training weeks prior. Our “first” oldest child made a shift. Her newly-older sister’s example, the catalyst.

Eden was joyful and obedient. Her little-heart’s zeal for Jesus and His children was unquenchable, and she was about all-things-Mommy-and-Daddy. Her life carried the perfect mark of an oldest child, one that would set the pace for children to come after her. “We want to preserve her place in our family,” we told our social worker during our homestudy. Every time I said that phrase I felt a nudge, a check, as if maybe that framework was being checked by the true family Planner.
When we learned about Lily, all we knew of her was her picture and a few brief observations from her soon-to-be foster mama. On paper, she was foolish for us. Adopting a child who would be third or fourth in line seemed like less of a risk than this one (who could be as old as 10 or 11 for all we knew), after which all the others would now follow.

But He led. He confirmed. He gently course-corrected.

And we walked what felt like the plank, with no reason other than His.

At times while we waited — and even after we immersed ourselves in Africa’s dust — the fear felt unbearable to me. I would read an email, a post to an adoption forum, another research article and find myself shackled, again. What were we thinking? We’re nuts. Worst-case scenario thinking would rest over me like a cloud. Our first few weeks with her offered many opportunities for me to search for confirmation of those very fears. My perspective was horizontal, not first from His source, going out from me and back to me.

But then, beauty broke dirt’s surface. Early indications rolled in: His plan was better.
Her quiet, gentle spirit began to carry a mantle of leadership. She desired obedience, and they made her a role model. She looked for hidden ways to bless, and they stole her ideas. She giggled loud, and the joy that marked our family before she came only grew. She received, and they, too, sought to shed orphan-skin.

He sent us a first-born, late but just in time, who hungered for Jesus — my deepest heart cry for my children.*

We couldn’t have ever known. Our principles would have kept us from His perfect plan, had He not been so gentle to speak clear and consistently.

He showed Himself faithful to thwart our plans with a better one.

Just the other day Nate found this in his pocket.

Lily-Prayer-683x1024

Her own words, not copywork. She hid it in his coat. Full of surprises, our little girl, their big sister.
Full of surprises, this mysterious God.

*One caveat for those of you who have brought older children home and are in the midst of the inevitable intensity that comes with a life finding a new home in you: our highs with Lily are sometimes proportionate to our lows. But isn’t that so with life? We want her to soar with Him, but it’s in the lowest places where we find that we were made to soar the heights. Lest you read this post and think we drew a “lucky” card, Jesus is healer in our home. And He will show Himself healer in yours. Though you may not see it today, I pray my words might be the same signpost He’s flashed for me. (He continues to flash for me.) God always wins, their hearts are included in that promise. Part of the healing, for us — for our hearts, has been to set up memorials around beauty and make the decision not to see struggle as the final verdict, but a pathway. He is good.

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Sara Hagerty
Sara Hagerty

Sara is a wife to Nate and a mother of four (and one on the way) whose birth canal bridged the expanse between the United States and Africa. After almost a decade of Christian life she was introduced to pain and perplexity and, ultimately, intimacy with Jesus. God met her and moved her when life stopped working. And out of the overflow of this perplexity, came her writing.You can read more of her writing at Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet.

Of My Own

“If Mommy gets a baby in her belly, will you send me back?” she asked him, with nervous eyes searching the floor, inhaling the shame of those words as if they were her indictment.

It’s often near the surface for this one — not the year she was “chosen” and a mommy and daddy flew all the way across the ocean to look her in the eyes and call her daughter — but the too-many, earlier years that still seem to weigh heavier. These days, she lives buoyant and giddy. Her eyes have found a sparkle and we see them more than we see those hands that spent nearly a year awkwardly covering them. My little girl laughs. A lot. And this week when I hugged her I could tell her body wanted to melt (not stiffen) in my arms.

But just within her reach is the shame she feels about her life on the other side, when her given last name tied her to no one. One phrase or question or hint of her past and I watch those eyes, which just harnessed a sparkle, go dark.

Adoption saved her and it haunts her, because of its open-ended definition to her. It’s still a question.

She, like many of the rest of us, has yet to reconcile the power of this one act.

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I hadn’t even kissed their foreheads or tickled their feet and this stranger’s words about them stung.

“Oh, you’re adopting? Just you wait. Once you have them at home I’m sure you’ll be able to have children of your own.”

A phrase I’ve heard a hundred times, and it never ceases to give my heart pause. Children of your own, words that expose a subconscious understanding of adoption as charitable affection versus primal love. As if these, once-adopted ones, were somehow, not truly … mine.

There is a distinction in our language about those children, once adopted, and their biological counterparts that reveals much more about the state of our hearts — the state of my heart — than it does about the children to whom it’s referring.

That simple phrase, often spoken by beautifully-intentioned people**, reveals the shame under which my daughter sometimes lives. But she’s not alone, she just lives an outward existence that represents the battle each one of us fights in our understanding of Him.

It is inherent to human flesh. We are interlopers, or so we think, hanging on to the coattails of another person’s inheritance. Certainly we’re not “one of His own”, we hold deep-down; instead we grasp at something we believe will never really name us. We are simply recipients of His charitable affections, we subconsciously reason.

Our language about physical adoption reveals the gaps in our understanding about how He has adopted us. And those words that sting when I hear them make me hurt more than just for my children, but for the representation of His name.

Most can’t imagine a love beyond what we see in the natural as the most intense form of love — the kind birthed when a mother’s body breaks open to give life to one that shared her flesh and her breath. How could it be that a mother could not only love, but see as her own, a child that her womb did not form and who wears another mama’s skin? We see the struggle of attaching, mother to child and child to mother, that so often happens in adoption, and it only reinforces our subconscious belief that true love between mother and child is only inherited through blood … and not won.

+++

When her eyes fill with the shame of her history and her heart begins to clamp behind them and adoption is still her question — am I truly “in” or just posing – I see me. I see a hundred weak yes’s as just plain weak and all the things I’ve declared with my mouth that my body never fulfilled and the times I poured out prayers to Him only to forget Him, the real source of my strength, hours later.

I see a never-ending list of failures.

I live, subtly, as if I am on the outside of that fence. Just like her.

All things that could be wiped away in an instant if I understood the power of His having adopted me. This reality changes everything.

I am a child of His own, this God-Man who wrapped His holiness around my sin-stained existence and renamed me.

Adopted.

Grafted.

I am one who is marked by His name more than any of my failures.

A child who knows that adoption isn’t really about the past that haunts her, the forever stamp of separate, not included, but instead the name of the King who fought, hard for her — she wears a love that is fierce.

She’s a force with which to be reckoned, this wildly-loved former-orphan.

Me.

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So when I hear that phrase “a child of your own” separating the children under my roof from the one my womb will bear, and my heart saddens at the misunderstanding of this wild-love that’s been birthed within my home* among children who wear another mama’s skin, I can’t help but think of Him.

He calls me “His own” when the world and my heart wants to label me forever severed.

Adoption is His great declaration.

*For the mama who has children “of her own” wearing different skin: This love we birthed, when we signed countless papers and spent sleepless nights waiting and fell in love with a picture or a name before we heard a heartbeat, is other but still very much His. To love them fiercely, like blood, requires an unnatural impartation of His love, in and through us. It’s not normal, but it is fully possible. In Him.

If you’re wrestling under the weight of the “not yet” that you feel towards them or the “not yet” that they demonstrate towards you, don’t shrink back. This gap is merely His opportunity to move. Now, more than ever, it’s your time to pray and to ask and to hope for Him to bind your family with a beautiful love that can only point back to His name.

**For those looking for a new term: There is grace to learn, and learn now. If you are like me, you have likely been one who learns what not to say by saying it several times the wrong way :) . You are in good company.

The term we and many other adoptive families prefer to use to distinguish a child born into a family versus one adopted into a family is “biological child”. We, personally, prefer not to refer to our children as “adopted children” as we see adoption as having been a one-time event. We just call them our children. (And this leaves room for all the other adjectives that define them;)). If we need to distinguish, we’ll say “we have four children who were adopted.” But that’s just our personal preference. No need to stumble over your words around us, we’re all learning — there is grace for you to stumble while you learn!

Photos compliments of Mandie Joy (who is currently fostering a baby, stateside! Pop on over to her blog to catch a glimpse of those baby-toes.)

For Your Continued Pursuit (verses on adoption): Ephesians 1:4-6 | Galatians 4:5-7 | 1 John 3:1 (&2) | Romans 9:26 | Romans 8:14-16 | Romans 8:21,23 | Ephesians 2:19 | Romans 9:8 | John 1:13 | Isaiah 43:7 | Psalm 27:10 | Hebrews 12:6 | Revelation 21:7 | Hebrews 2:10 | Ephesians 3:15 | John 11:25 | Psalm 68:5-6 | Psalm 10:14, 17-18

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Sara Hagerty
Sara Hagerty

Sara is a wife to Nate and a mother of four (and one on the way) whose birth canal bridged the expanse between the United States and Africa. After almost a decade of Christian life she was introduced to pain and perplexity and, ultimately, intimacy with Jesus. God met her and moved her when life stopped working. And out of the overflow of this perplexity, came her writing.You can read more of her writing at Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet.

Why I Adopt {the first half of the story}

{If you haven’t yet, read the precursor to this post, which is actually the second half of this story.}

And this is how I found the heart at the center of justice …

College witnessed his first growth spurt. By what can only be attributed to the hand of God, Nate landed himself amid a group of boys (ready to be men) who had an early understanding that no part of knowing God was passive. They had a zest for life and for Him and for a life in Him that wasn’t just attractive, but was real.

They wrestled in the basement of this house-made-into-bullpen — pushed the furniture back and let the floor absorb their sweat as they sought grappling preeminence. Those same walls heard late night conversations about God and impact and a life lived alive. They played, hard, and loved Him and one another, hard.

I came into the picture when the caps and gowns were boxed up and what they’d talked about for years was finally being given wings with the freedom that comes from being in your twenties and charting your own course. And I couldn’t help but love them too, so many who now wore rings and had pledged allegiance to women who not only gave them permission but access to that flight-of-life, in Him.

In our early married years, the dreaming they’d done in college began to take shape. They would love, out-loud, those that many deemed to be unlovable. They would reach the unreached with a life — flesh, pressed against flesh — not just a message. They would lay down their pedigrees and positions for the lowly of the earth. They would live the Sermon on the Mount.

These men and their wives made plans to follow Him to the run-down parts of a Virginia city and plant a stake there that said: He loves in unexpected ways.

And their plans took shape. They bought houses for pennies and relinquished their Wall Street opportunities for back-alley living. They did it. They poured their lives into a cup of cold water for the poor.

Homeless MJ

Nate and I — we watched.

We left living room meetings where these plans were hashed out — only to pick up the argument we’d been having hours earlier on the way there. We barely knew how to be married, much less how to breathe. I was burnt-out, tired, on this treadmill of youth ministry I’d continued to turn up, despite my heart and body’s signs of depletion, and Nate was fielding all of my fallout.

We could hardly have the conversation, alongside our friends, of “what might this look like for us” because we hardly knew what He looked like after all these years of following Him. We were bone-dry and thirsty.

We had no cup of cold water to give and weren’t quite sure we knew how to to drink, ourselves.

9-11 2 PitcherMJ

I wrestled both with guilt and a measure of understanding of myself that kept me uncomfortable, yet certain that we weren’t to join this band of brothers for this next season. I had understood life to be impact for His kingdom, but I had nothing to give. They were called to live a radical expression I’d dreamed, but if I wore their shoes it would feel false.

This wasn’t my season. The expression wasn’t my particular calling. I couldn’t explain it more than that, I just knew I couldn’t force my way into another’s story and vision the way I had so readily in years past.

In the years that followed, God hid me. He hedged me in. I had no choice but to survive, and survival, for me, meant finding this God I’d said “yes” to on that snowy night in November at a Young Life camp, so many years before. I wet my journal with tears and unstuck the pages of my Bible. I talked to Him. A lot. I made scripture my prayer and paced the first floor of my house in darkened mornings and after the sun went down, asking to see the face of God. I sought my first love. I wanted back those early summer nights when Jesus felt near and His Word was the blanket over my life.

And I awkwardly formed responses at social gatherings and with old friends who poked underneath the hood to ask me about my life. They once knew me as the driven one who’d do anything for impacting the kingdom, yet somehow I wasn’t that girl anymore, nor did I really know who I was.

I just was beginning to know Him.

I sunk deep in my chair when others talked about the vision they had for reaching their community (or even just their neighbors) for Him. I didn’t know how to walk out my front door with confidence. I was being stripped of all I knew, whittled down to just this one thing:Him.

And I barely had language for this grand unraveling.

I thought that this, then, would be my life: forever stripped of any outward ability to make a dent in the world, but knowing — secretly — that I moved His heart. I was growing to understand that this season which I despised, was one He not only loved, but orchestrated. He liked me when no one was looking. He enjoyed my private devotion.

He was jealous. For me.

And just when I’d settled in to living, forever, in this closet we’d carved, He called for a change.

Out of this deep, dark crying-out to God — that had very little to do with any outward impact and all to do with impacting the heart of the God who made me and relished in my looking-up at Him — came the call.

Road

Adopt.

In the throes of a barren womb, with many options, He made His voice for our one option clear.

I didn’t know then that one would lead to two, would lead to four (and likely more). Like any calling, we dip our toes in the water of “yes” and hope to God that this is the biggest “yes” we’ll have to utter — only to find ourselves fully submerged, years later.

Justice knocked on my door in the form of a Man and He whispered to me in my closet that this next season of love would include an expression outside of my little cave.

I knew it was right. And it was time.

Love had its way with me. I would be a bearer of justice, just a decade later than I thought and through a means I’d never conceived would be part of my story.

Had I done it early — had I moved out of obligation or pure zeal, and not from the place of that whisper-in-the-dark — I may have missed that great love story, incited when no one was looking.

And this, then, is why I adopt …

I adopt because I am crazy in love with this God-Man who loved me when I produced absolutely nothing for Him.

I adopt because my most unproductive-to-the-kingdom years may just have been some of His favorites.

I adopt because when I read Him in the book of John, I can’t help but ask to see His eyes, in every account, just like I felt them beautifully boring into me when I couldn’t get out of my bed in brokenness.

I adopt because He wooed me and I am wrecked. For a Man — and what’s on His heart — not a mission.

The only thing I, personally, can uniquely do on this earth — that no one else can — is worship Him through my life. This worship is a construct of God’s, that in some seasons may look like keeping our hands still but our heart alive, and in some seasons it’s crazy messy with the dirt of another’s life in your story.

Field

God is awakening His bride to worship with their lives. Him.

It’s here and only here that we will be fully alive. All the rest is the outpouring.(Yes, all the rest becomes all the more full when our eyes and our mission is fixed on His face.)

This is a call to the mamas and the sick and the broken and the ones who, like I was once, are having their insides re-wired: you aren’t sidelined from mission — nor do you need to buck-up and make yourself do it to feel like you matter — you are invited. Now. To have private stories of encountering the living and active God that may, at times, make your public life look like it lacks impact.

Let the holy start in your closet with that conversation with Him.

9-11 5 Grapes

If our pews were full of those who walked in on a Sunday morning after having a week-long brush with the Father who told them how He saw them, who spoke to the darkest parts of their hearts with hope and strength and wrapped His arms around their brittle frames, no walls could contain us. What might we do for this God?

For those of you who want your community to adopt or to live right up against the broken, pray that we — the church — see our own fatherlessness. When the fatherless like me, even long before my father died, get moved by the Father, they can’t help but bring others into that fold.

Lovers will always outwork workers.

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I have four under my roof who are being restored and, as far as we can tell, they are our first fruits. Our hearts have room for more. We rub elbows with the poor of our community as our family feeds them and prays for them. This, now, is just what we do. And it all goes back to some dark-black nights and mornings stuck in bed where the Father came to me and to Nate and began to show us who He really was.

We will rarely find love in the arms of justice but we will surely find justice in the arms of Love.

I longed for justice and then I encountered the One who created it.

And it all started with those eyes of His. When no one was looking.

(And those friends of ours in Virginia? They are still doing it. Still living there, a decade later. Still loving the world’s discarded. And it is beauty, pure beauty. A decade of beauty.)

For Your Continued Pursuit: Isaiah 42:1-4 | Exodus 20:5 | Luke 10:42 | John 12:1-7 | 1 John 3:17-18 | Psalm 33:5 | Psalm 140:12 | Psalm 27:4 | Song of Songs 8:7 | 2 Corinthians 8:9 | Matthew 26:13

Photos compliments of Mandie Joy (who, by the way, has some pretty sweet happenings over in her space!). 

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Sara Hagerty
Sara Hagerty

Sara is a wife to Nate and a mother of four (and one on the way) whose birth canal bridged the expanse between the United States and Africa. After almost a decade of Christian life she was introduced to pain and perplexity and, ultimately, intimacy with Jesus. God met her and moved her when life stopped working. And out of the overflow of this perplexity, came her writing.You can read more of her writing at Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet.

 

Why I Adopt {the second half* of the story}

We wait under fluorescent lights for the girls to file in. Though there are some new faces each month, the veterans’ familiarity with us sets all the girls at ease. They know what to expect this night, these children of routine and rhythm, whose variables have been eliminated so that they might have one last chance at childhood peace.

They bound in, freshly showered — though many of them with hair in knots. Their locks are missing a mama’s touch.

All are dressed for bed but with hearts ready for play.

We’ve been instructed not to hug or hold, as touch has been a weapon wielded against many of these innocents. We’ve come somewhat in stealth to this secular institution — missionaries with His Word hidden, thumping, in our hearts, waiting to offer even just a morsel of life to children who casually say things like “I’m never getting out of here” and “I want my mommy back.”

The whole thing feels so surreal, each time I go. We laugh and dance and sing and I have to separate myself from the part of me that feels, deeply, the story of another in order to do pirouettes and make small talk and color. We all do.

Sometimes we catch another’s eyes — these women with whom I spend the other threeWednesday nights of the month, fanning the flame of our hunger for Him in a basement with Bible’s and hearts so often cracked — with a look that says: how can you even take in all this pain in one room? 

On this particular night, the singers in our group are teaching the jammie-clad how to sing scripture. One-by-one these giddy girls jump from the floor to join the line of their friends trying their hand at putting a chorus to a snippet of His Word. They’re not old enough to be bashful; this is another chance for the mic. And we, among them, are secretly praying that this open mic night for these little ones — whose lives have experienced more life change in a month than many do in a lifetime — might enact a forever heart change.

Then the mic passes to her.

The one who eked out “I’m new here” in the middle of sobs, months ago, when she tumbled into our group one Wednesday night. In this place “new” doesn’t carry with it hope of a new landscape with new opportunities, or maybe even a new mommy and daddy. This particular place was an end-point for many whose conditions, worn as scars from a life too-early gone amiss, blocked them even from the shifting sands of domestic foster care.

She’d since learned the ropes. She had to — it was her well-learned survival to learn new spaces quickly and make a home out of any bed and a dresser.

She skips the Word that was passed to her and freelances, this fatherless one. I forget now most of her words, but for this one chorus where she stuck and stayed: The Lord is my Daddy, the Lord is my Daddy. Blond, would-be curls in wet knots falling over her closed eyes as she belts out words I can barely swallow when I realize who it is that is singing them.

She’s desperate for a Daddy, in a form of desperation I may never have known. Five (or six), and she has no hope but Him and her song carries weight as if she knows it. Somewhere deep in there, she knows it.

We all join her in singing. Her friends do too, this group of outward-ruffians whose insides were made in His image.

And I wonder about the chorus in heaven, now, this night.

What does the Father think of this sight — this tattered-child, His bruised reed, robing herself in a plea, now made a declaration as she sings it.

The night ended and I felt its slight impotence.

We didn’t tuck them in. I didn’t push her hair back away from her forehead and plant a kiss as a remainder mark of the day or a promise that she’d find safety in me, tomorrow. I didn’t sing that chorus back to her while I rubbed her back and her droopy eyelids fell like curtains on the day.

Whether their skin is freckled with boils from diseases their unwashed bodies too-readily received, or they get a shower every night and a visit with the one they call Mommy every month, the child without parents to shape and mold and hold them wakes up to the same void that tucks them into bed at night.

But this little girl hit the truth with the chorus she sang.

Full bellies and painted toenails and foreheads full of kisses only serve to reinforce the truth that will sprout a child into a wildly alive adult: the Lord is our Daddy. And even those of us who’ve never questioned whether a meal would come or a night would end with Daddy’s knees finding their way into the already-established carpet imprints beside their bed — we still have to find the truth of that song.

Some of us spend decades doing so.

Beginning to grasp the mystery of the God who fashioned the sun to give us light also making Himself into a Father is what is making this mess-of-me whole. In my thirties.

“The Lord is my Daddy” are words I not only want to sing, but intimately know. (And I barely know them, now.)

So, why do I adopt?

If He is the answer for those dozen-plus little girls over there, not too far from my backyard, who have no strong arms to cuddle them at night, what draws me to step in?

It’s the vacant corridor I see behind her eyes when she feels the shame of a past she never willed or wished. It’s the lie I know she is telling me when I ask a question she’s too afraid to answer about a subject that makes her uncomfortable. It’s the uncombed knots in her hair post-shower. These physical gaps that tell the story of spiritual gaps, waiting to be filled – they are why I adopt.

We proxy.

God came in the flesh and still, today, allows our flesh to manifest elements of His glory. Our dirt doesn’t keep Him at a distance, in fact, some of the greatest glory is birthed into that very dirt.

For me, it’s maybe more selfish than it is selfless.

Adoption puts a stake in the ground that says “Restoration? Right here.” And I want to stand as near as I can to that sign, to that post, to that glory.

I adopt because it makes all the broken shards of a life, that seem to wedge their way into my skin when I get close to it, feel minuscule compared to the beauty of the song I get to hear from the mouths of ones who are discovering it, anew, alongside me: The Lord is my Daddy.

And this is the venue He has given for me — the one He has called me, personally, to — to hear that song louder than any earthly gap.

Because that gap is in my own heart too.

*[But this is the second half of the story. It’s the other one — the first half of the story — that keeps me up at night. Come back in a few days and I’ll finish this post … by introducing it.]

First, second, third and fifth photos compliments of Mandie Joy (who, by the way, has some pretty sweet happenings over in her space!). Fourth photo compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography.

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Sara and her husband, Nate, have been married 10 years. They brought home their two children from Ethiopia in 2010 and two more from Uganda in 2011. They have a heart for prayer and to see people touched by the love of Jesus. What started as a blog chronicling the ups and downs of adoption has become a passion for Sara. You can read more of her musings on orphans, walking with God through pain and perplexity . . . and spinach juice at Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet.

{Hitting repeat} God doesn’t need me

This is our daughter, just after she arrived at the orphanage. Taken by a doctor who wanted to show us the extent of her malnourishment.

Yes, the orphan crisis is one of the few things that keeps me up at night. Children not only abandoned to AIDS, poverty, and war but then subject to exploitation at the hands of traffickers in their own hometowns . . . and in my hometown. The lump in my throat comes not at the vast numbers of children orphaned throughout the world but at the mental image of one single child. Cracked lips, hair matted from sweat, dirt caked fingernails, and bloodshot eyes from yet another night of poor sleep on the street.

Millions of little cross-bearers fill our earth without someone to help carry their load. I have yet to hear a story of an orphan enfolded into a home that didn’t reek of pain. The weight of my own personal pain has seemed unbearable at times, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what some of these 6 and 7 year-old orphans have faced. Alone. Their tolerance for pain stretched thin and at an age where I didn’t have one “ouchie” go unkissed.

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Eden’s ballet class is tomorrow. She dances around the room in a flurry of African hip-jerks and pirouette attempts. In her leotard and tights, the only thing that distinguishes her from her classmates (also learning to harness their energy into beauty) is her size. I sometimes forget that her petite frame didn’t come because God intended her to be pint-sized but because, as an infant, she spent her days laying alone next to the field where her father worked. No breast to feed this little ballerina.

As I futilely try to wrap my mind around how I see one of the world’s greatest crises—a child plodding through life parentless—there is one conclusion, however, that I keep coming back to.

God doesn’t need me.

I have to admit there are times when I’ve approached this crisis (and even our own adoption as an answer) with a virulent pride, albeit subtle. On the surface, it comes in the form of seeing myself orchestrating a rescue mission. But, a few layers deep reveals a fissure in my understanding of God. He did not create this crisis—but that does not mean He is powerless to fix it. And, when the catalyst for my actions is the belief that God needs me to respond, He is relegated to a copilot. I become the healer; He becomes my helper as I heal.

The end result of this line of thinking or an intimate peak into the things God cares about can look the same: zealous passion for the things on God’s heart. But, the source of that passion is everything.

As we move forward with our next adoption, I wrestle with pride about how I am responding to (what I perceive to be) one of the world’s greatest crises. And, when I’m there, I am usually furiously chasing paperwork and breathing down my social worker’s neck to see if we could possibly speed things up and get these children home sooner.

And, at times, I rest my head on His chest, like I used to do with my dad when I was a child, and I hear His heartbeat for these little ones. And, I ache with the pain that He allows me to feel from His heart. And, when I’m there . . . I am usually furiously chasing paperwork and breathing down my social worker’s neck to see if we could possibly speed things up and get these children home sooner.

I believe God cares more about the source of my passion than the reach of its output. My invitation to participate is less about meeting a need than it is about walking more deeply with the Father. And, this hard-won truth has come after years of zealous pride in my “work.”

I know now that there are two rescue missions going on in this adoption. He’s rescuing my heart, even more still. He’s giving me a window into how He feels about orphans. His heartbeat. His plan. And He’s tenderly letting me in on His work, in the same way I allow my little Caleb to help me cook. He’s drawing me in deeper into Himself by using me in the life of a child He could so easily save without me.

And He’s putting the lonely—two of them, in this case—in a family. Even under our roof and in our arms, they will still need Jesus. Clean water, soft skin, and big comfy beds are what He lets me provide, among other things. But, the power to save rests not in my hands.

He likes it when we respond to His heart, and the world is brought more deeply in line with His kingdom when we do so. It’s just that, actually, God doesn’t need me.

He chooses to invite me.

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Sara and her husband, Nate, have been married 10 years. They brought home their two children from Ethiopia in 2010 and two more from Uganda in 2011. They have a heart for prayer and to see people touched by the love of Jesus. What started as a blog chronicling the ups and downs of adoption has become a passion for Sara. You can read more of her musings on orphans, walking with God through pain and perplexity . . . and spinach juice at Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet.

Her Inheritance

“And I want Mommy to have a baby in her belly,” I overheard her say as I was walking up the stairs this morning. I stopped in the hallway outside her room just long enough to hear “but sometimes it takes a long long time for babies to come. You have to pray and pray and pray. And wait.”

My daughter delivered a five year-old summary of her mommy’s life.

Nate had been talking with them about Zechariah and Elizabeth. And, to Eden, Elizabeth was another one of those women – like Sarah and Mary … or her mommy – whose story reminded her that pregnancy must come at the hands of a miraculous God.

I’d never told her I want to be pregnant.

She wasn’t my “second choice”, and I didn’t trust her young mind to later process my desire alongside of her own story with a healthy perspective. She was too young to catch wind of her Mommy’s pain.

The first time I remember her mentioning it was after a playgroup where all the women, but two of us, were pregnant. Children built towers, played instruments and read books around their mothers who shared life-stories. Naturally the topic of pregnancy came up. And my little one, who has not yet lost the hyper-vigilance that is a survival mechanism for many orphans, absorbed every word.

Later, in her prayers, she asked God to “send a baby to her mommy’s belly.”

It initially hurt my heart.

I’ve been preparing to field questions and observations about how our family is different for years. I just didn’t expect the first of them to be about my personal scarlet letter. I anticipated that she’d one day feel the pang of our skins’ different colors and her unique entrance into our family, but I didn’t suspect she’d have this other difference on her radar.

While the things that make our family different don’t seem to be a struggle for her now, they may one day become more than observations. I could call it maternal instinct that makes me want to protect her from every potential hurt, every pain. But my heavenly Father’s instincts were different.

His protection came not from avoiding that which would cause pain, but for offering His companionship as I walked through it. The valley of the shadow of death is land claimed by the Father. It is a holy place.

For me. And for my daughter.

At five, she has lived years I want to erase, but that God will redeem. And then, as one grafted in to this family, she has inherited new opportunities for pain.

But the ground I’ve taken in my life and heart, as it relates to processing my lack, doesn’t need to be won over, again, by her.

Her inheritance comes (from God) through me. She is my legacy. What I win in my lifetime — in terms of a hopeful perspective on all He has allowed and joy in the midst of “setback” — she gets to live out.

Her words to Nate this morning were not pain-filled. Sure, something in her – I’m not quite sure even why – wants her mommy to be like the other mommy’s with babies in their bellies. She longs, in the way a five year-old has capacity to. But what she has come to know as commonplace Christianity has taken me years to receive:

You don’t always get what you want, but in the face of delay, you pray and pray and pray. And wait. Sometimes for a long, long time.

And in the meantime you worship the One who holds beauty.

My highest aim as a parent is not to try and protect my children from all that might befall them, but to, instead, seek the healing touch of Jesus in every area of my own life, knowing that they will inherit what I leave behind. The “unfinished” will be theirs to finish or to pass along. And those ashes subjected to beauty, will remain their crown.

At five, Eden doesn’t wonder if God will still be who she believes Him to be if, next month, Mommy isn’t pregnant. “God is good, He is so so good to me,” she sings as her bare feet dangle from the potty.

Bracing myself against the hits I fear might come from the Father is a distant memory. After many years of having my soil tilled and turned, the ground is supple to receive the God of Hope.

And because of His great mercy in my life, to save me from my fearfully expectant heart, my daughter receives new land on which to plant.

My freedom won is her inheritance to build upon.

The fullness of God I pray almost daily for in my own life, isn’t just my platform for the next age. It’s hers too.

And her daughter’s.

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Sara and her husband, Nate, have been married for nine years and brought home their two children from Ethiopia last year. They recently started the adoption process for two more from Uganda. They have a heart for prayer and to see people touched by the love of Jesus. What started as a blog chronicling the ups and downs of adoption has become a passion for Sara. You can read more of her musings on orphans, walking with God through pain and perplexity . . . and spinach juice at Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet.

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