where you been?

you haven't blogged lately.

it's a funny thing, the private personal public nature of this blog world. it's a place for me to process my innermost thoughts and feelings for all the world to see.

first of all, for those of you in my balcony on the healthy eating weight losing roller coaster thing: obviously the reason i haven't written is because i'm struggling to maintain. it's not the weight i'm trying to maintain. actually i'm maintaining THAT quite well. it's the motivation. even though i have maybe a hundred reasons to want to change, to be different, to be healthy, to get thin, to eat better, to exercise, to take care of the body God gave me . . . i'm not feeling any of them.

so what do i tell my children when they say, "but i don't f-e-e-l like _______"? sometimes doing the right thing goes against our feelings. it's called discipline. diligence. diligence is a man's precious possession. (proverbs something)

the most motivating motivator i've had lately is Daniel. he was set apart for God in the midst of a foreign pagan idol-worshipping land where he was a political prisoner of sorts. he was set apart by what he ate. he set himself apart for God by deliberately living a fasted life, not being bought with the delicacies of the king's table.

the king's man, who was over the group of young men daniel was part of, said (read with an italian mafia kind of accent), "look, buddy, i'd like to help you out, but, if you only eat your vegetables (there's a switch moms - a kid who ONLY wants to eat veggies) you're going to start to look bad and it's my butt on the line, know what i'm saying? so you boys be good and eat your meat and drink your wine, okay?"

Daniel said, "give me 10 days. 10 days of just vegetables and water. if i look bad then, you got me, i'll do what you say. but if i'm looking fit and feeling fine, you let me do it God's way." and he did. he and his homeys ate rabbit food and came out looking better than all the king's men (and all his horses too, incidentally), and they were given permission to be permanently set apart, which came in handy in the next chapter when the king has a bad dream one night and a rippin' bad 'tude the next day, wanting an interpretation without telling the dream, deciding to kill all the supposedly wise men on his staff including the young punks from Israel, and Daniel gets the revelation AND the interpretation - arguably because he had set himself apart.

10 days. veggies. set apart. Daniel.

Daniel is the name we had chosen for our first born (for the middle name) and our youngest, both of whom wound up being girls and therefore did not get named daniel.

which brings me to Part B of the answer to the question 'where you been'.

we've been thinking about adopting. which means i've been thinking about it almost constantly and he's been thinking about it fleetingly each time i bring it up. [i don't fault him for this quality; it's how God made him. it means he's really doing whatever it is he's doing, and it's a good way to be.] then we fasted and prayed about it as a family; which means we were all thinking about it and talking about it and praying about it and hearing from God about it, and in the end, we felt clearly what we heard at the very beginning: that we had been given an invitation.

i had always liked adoption, wanted to adopt, wrote a paper about adoption, was positively predisposed to adoption. i have two cousins who are adopted, who, i'll admit, i forgot were adopted. it's not that i wasn't around or don't remember it. i remember it vividly. it's just that, well, they are mine, and nothing could convince me otherwise. i don't think of them as adopted. i think of them as my cousins.

i also have an adopted niece and nephew. it is a little easier to remember with them because of their beautiful chocolaty brown skin, huge brown eyes, and because it is more recent. but they are also unquestionably unmistakeably mine..

when my brother and his fam were in africa as missionaries, we visited them, and from the outset of the trip, adoption was on my heart. part of his job was helping to make first one orphanage and then another, happen. there were nearly 200 children without parents there. most had some kind of families, but almost all had lost mother and/or father to HIV.

i wrote a song for my youngest sister's wedding called 'gift to me'. immediately after their wedding, it became a song between me and my children. when i went to africa, it became an adoption song. and my mom, who arrived there a week earlier than i, taught it to the children at the first orphanage to sing and dance to when we arrived. so we get out of the jeep after a day and a half of travel, approach the welcoming committee (which in kenya is everyone) of 96 children singing to us:

you are a gift to me, sent from the Father
(keep in mind, i've got adoption on the brain - i know that it takes 3 months to adopt from kenya, you have to live there for 3 months, and i'm trying to figure out how to get my then 7 children and us back there to live for 3 months and take home as many as we can afford to buy a plane ticket for)
from the day i was born, God had you in mind
and every day you help me remember how much He loves me
'cause He gave you to me

i wept. so the idea of adopting beautiful brown skinned children has been in my heart for a little while.

moving to our home of the last 6 years which is located in a neighborhood populated pretty much exclusively by people of African American heritage also, i think, helped prepare us for this leg of our journey on the planet. we have loved dozens of brown skinned neighbors. loved them. not because of their skin. not in spite of their skin. just loved. loved the heart, loved the person, loved the inside and the outside.

so, not long ago, our old friend lou engle speaks, and as he's speaking, we both hear God speak. i had honestly put adoption in the 'not right now, maybe later' box, primarily because, hey, i've got biological offspring in what some would call excessive numbers. look at me, do i need more children? [of course, the more appropriate question turns out to be, do more children need me] but i don't have 10 children because i need them. i delight in them, but that's not why i have them. i have them because i said yes to God.

adoption seemed like not an option because i didn't think the people handing out spare children would give any to a woman who lives in a shoe. for a long time, i didn't think we could handle even what we had, and honestly, the idea of having a home study, you know, where someone STUDIES your HOME, scared me to death. i do not feel worthy of a whole lot of scrutiny. i have the organizational skills of a tornado and the consistency of midwestern weather (we have a saying in my town: don't like the weather here, give it an hour, it'll change). it just didn't seem like a good idea to pay someone to come and give us the fine tooth comb treatment.

and then God said - why don't you try, take it out for a spin, see what I'll do? turns out, the same One handing out biological children is the one handing out the adoptive kind. same Guy.

so we are taking the first steps. baby step to the christian adoption consultants (tracie loux). baby step to the home study application fee. baby step to the 80 plus pictures and 8 pages of answers to the questionnaire for the family profile. baby step to spring cleaning our house top to bottom to be ready for the home*study.

i've been busy. busy hands. busy mind. busy heart.

i'm trying to apply the salve of the Word of God to my fluttering heart (like Noah's dove, not finding anywhere to land) and i have found peace there that passes my understanding (which isn't a lot). it's good for me.

Daniel is what i would like to name our first male adopted brown skin baby. set apart. 10 days. i am not going to start a daniel fast on or before easter. i know Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead for me. it's just that, well, cadbury eggs only come around once a year . . .