There are a lot of countdowns going on here—our biggest annual event Together Called is only days away, and our trip to China to serve at an orphanage pretty much immediately follows.

For months, the team has been raising funds, filling out paperwork, considering schedules and preparing logistically. We’ve been coming together on conference calls so we can work better together as a team, creating t-shirts so we look like a team, and going through material to grow us as we are a part of a bigger team. Some of us have already started packing bags, making sure we squeeze everything in and stay under 40 lbs. which can be a wee bit of a challenge for overthinkers like me. Regardless of who much overthinking we’re doing about those bags, we’re nearly on our way. On February 27th, we’ll be able to put everyone’s faces with the voices we’ve come to recognize from those conferences calls and get on a China-bound flight together.

Though our team numbers only 13 as we serve at an orphanage in Shaanxi, we know our team is exponentially bigger than that. Each one of the home teams of those 13 members from across the country makes this Visit and Serve team huge! What a comfort it is to know that while we may be the hands there doing the work through His grace, the rest of the body is supporting us and enabling us to be there. It’s so not just the 13 of us.

It’s not too late to be a part of the team. You may not be on that plane with us as we nervously chatter and try to cat nap as we’re able, but we want you there. And, you can be. We’re rallying our home teams to lift us up throughout our travel day February 27th-28th in very specific ways. Can you commit 30 minutes on that day to sit with us and advocate for us from your living room as you sip on a cup of coffee? Can you maybe do a harder thing and set your alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to do the same as we are still flying across the world?

Feel that nudge to join us? Email me. I’ll reply with some info for you and maybe my own form of nervous email chatter. Heading back to my daughter’s home city, meeting her ayis, holding the babies who are there waiting can produce some nervous chatter in me.

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Forever changed by our experience of being adopted and adopting, Kelly is a stay-at-home mom/manager to 4 children and a professional juggler, juggling her calling as wife and mother with her secondary callings (editing and serving adoptive families through The Sparrow Fund). You can learn more about their adoption story, how they’ve been changed, and what life for them looks like on their personal blog, My Overthinking.

Christmas 2009. Four Christmases ago. I was a wreck. We were so close to finding our new daughter. I just knew it would be a few weeks after Christmas; I hoped it would be a few weeks after Christmas. I was filled with expectation that Christmas.

And, that meant that though I didn’t know who she was or where exactly she was, what she looked like or how old she was, I knew she was. I knew she was somewhere across the world, alone on Christmas, what turned out to be her first Christmas.

I was anxious and wondering and thinking all the time about her. Yet, there was something that gave me great peace.

God was there.

In Luke 2:6-20, Luke mentioned the manger three times. Why?

The manger was messy. It wasn’t what we picture and what our children play with as part of our little nativity sets they can hold in their hands. It wasn’t a symmetrical wooden contraption with a sweet bed of hay. It was more like a box looking thing or basin made out of clay mixed with hay or stones and held together with mud. All kinds of food for animals was put into it, not just nice yellow hay. It was dirty, likely moldy, smelly, not anything we’d want our child anywhere near.

And, God was there. Very literally, God was there.

As spunky and full of life as Lydia is now, there was a time that she was in a pretty messy place. I believe her orphanage was one of the better ones—her needs were met, and we’ve learned that there were quite caring women who took to her there. There was a wall of windows with natural light in the room where she lived 24-7. In that room were 40 cribs and a few toys for all to share to pass their days until they graduated to another room and then another. There were older children in that orphanage too, children we weren’t allowed to see. I wonder what their days were like.

I’ve heard a lot of stories, stories about adopted children who flinch when someone moves their direction in fear that they will be hit; children with flat heads who were never held; children who have come to accept that no one wants to bring home a child their age, only babies; children who suffer significant consequences from not having the medical treatment they needed earlier.

And, yet, I believe God is there.

God is not only not afraid to get his feet dirty; He is about getting His feet dirty. That’s what advent is all about, isn’t it? God coming down, the perfect to the broken, the holy to the unholy.

Psalm 34:18 tells us He’s close to the brokenhearted, and there are so many, so very many. I can only imagine that He is very close indeed to brokenhearted children—here and there—whether they are aware of their brokenness or not. He’s there.

I prayed for our daughter four Christmases ago, that He would be close to her, that He would remain close to her. That He would be tangibly felt in that room where she slept. That He would wrap His arms around her when she was cold. That He’d rock her when she needed comfort. That He’d be in the manger with her.

I know He was there.

And, somehow, in the dark places of orphanages around the world, I can’t explain how or what He always looks like there, but I believe that He’s there. In the warmth of the sun pouring in the windows, He comforted my child. In the smile of a nanny. In the gaze of another orphan. In the provision sent by charities around the world. In her broken heart—emotionally and literally.

Somehow, He was there.

Now, as my children listen to us read about His story every night, sing familiar and unfamiliar words together to prepare, sneak Hershey kisses in their mouths as we make reindeer eyes, and use entirely too much scotch tape on crafts and wrapping paper alike, He is here…and, He is there, somehow making an unholy place, holy.

That’s what advent is about. That’s what He’s about.

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Forever changed by our experience of being adopted and adopting, Kelly is a stay-at-home mom/manager to 4 children and a professional juggler, juggling her calling as wife and mother with her secondary callings (editing and serving adoptive families through The Sparrow Fund). You can learn more about their adoption story, how they’ve been changed, and what life for them looks like on their personal blog, My Overthinking.

{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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.