Still Waiting...

As some of you may know, the main theme of Advent is waiting. We're told to "wait for the Lord"--to wait for His coming. This waiting is part of what marks us as Christians. Waiting is part of who we are, part of our DNA. As someone who has inherited this almost 2,000 year old penchant for waiting, it should be easy, right?

Waiting, I must confess, is getting old. For over 3 years now we have been waiting and hoping that Monica would get pregnant. It hasn't happened so we continue to wait. Now our journey includes adoption plans. I'm thankful for the opportunity and resources to be able to pursue adoption, but even this process hasn't removed the waiting aspect. Now we find ourselves waiting for enough finances for the next step. When we reach that goal, we'll enter into another phase of waiting--waiting to be matched with a birth mother. And then we'll wait some more.

Enduring these years of hoping and waiting has been difficult for Monica. She so badly wants to hold a baby, her baby; to experience what so many women around her have been experiencing these last few years. For me, waiting reminds me that I'm not in control. I can't will a baby into our family. I can't make Monica's dreams come true. These things are not in my control and that bothers me. And so I wait, but as I said above, waiting is getting old. So what do we do in the interim?

During the Advent and Christmas seasons, we have been singing a song at church called "Emmanuel." Here are some of the words to that song (also found here):

What fear we felt in the silent age

Four-hundred years can He be found

But broken by a baby's cry

Rejoice in the hallowed manger ground

Every time we've sung this song I got tears in my eyes. Although it hasn't been 400 years since we heard from God (Monica says sometimes it's felt that long!) these last few years have seemed to drag on and on and on (reminds me of a scene in The Jerk, but I digress...). When singing these words it gives me hope--hope that this fear, this waiting, this silence can be broken. And like the people of Israel there was nothing they could do to bring this about. This baby was not a work of their own hands, or something, or someone, they produced; rather, this baby came as a gift from heaven. This baby was a miracle.

I find consolation in this story for it speaks of a God who can do impossible and improbable things. I know we are not guaranteed that our circumstances will work out just as we had planned. I'm not banking on the events of life to go a certain way; rather, I'm putting my hope in this God who can break into the silence of our lives and radically transform everything. For that reason I'll continue to 'rejoice in the hallowed manger ground.'

The Sounds of Life These Days

Addie has been reeling off some pretty funny things to say these days, so I thought I'd "put them down on paper" before I forget them. Here they are:

• Lately if Monica or I have made mention of Disney, or Florida, or the princesses, or anything Disney related, Addie says, "You know I don't want you to talk about that place because it'll just make me want to go back!" Mom and Dad are still learning boundaries!
• "Dad, sometimes I can see stuff you and Mom can't, like invisible stuff. Like this morning I saw purple stuff coming down from the sky."
• Today we had an exciting morning as we saw an opossum in our backyard. For a bit it went out of our view and I thought it went into a window-well, which can be seen in our basement. We went downstairs to get a look and again Addie's superhero powers came into play, "Dad, lift me up because I can see invisible stuff."
• {A week or so ago I was at her school helping her and other kids build gingerbread houses and a little girl next to me was saying something. I ask her what she said and then Addie chimed in with this...} "Don't worry about 'K', she talks crazy-talk sometimes!"
• Tonight while reading a book about adoption, I asked Addie, without any other prompting and without previously introducing the characters, what was taking place on the page. Her response, "That's the social worker, and she is showing the mommy a picture of the baby they're going to adopt."

I've been teasing with Addie lately saying that I don't want her to get any bigger or older than she is right now, which she finds pretty funny. While I know I can't stop the onward march of time, I wish I could because I love the stage she is at right now. I know that all too soon the innocence of the statements above will be replaced by the words of a school-age girl, and then those of a teenager, and so on. I know parents with older kids will tell me that each age and stage has its own merits, but I'm not ready for those other stages yet. I like my 5-year-old just the way she is.