Filling in the Gaps

Since flying off to Rwanda with no paperwork and demanding a baby would get me nowhere, life goes on. Busy busy life goes on. Christmas cards, Christmas parties, advent, cookie exchanges, Christmas shopping, Christmas travel (road trip!), a five-year-old birthday party to plan and throw, you're eighteen months old and you're still only eating five things?! life goes on. Still, my missing children are never far from my mind. I wonder if next year at this time I will know who they are. Will I have a picture? Will I, like so many families this past month, be praying for a November court date? Will I get the best Christmas present ever next year? I am ever hopeful. I love that my God is the God of time, that His ways are not my ways, that He gives us more than we can ever ask for or imagine. Life in the gaps.

The Longing is the Hardest Part

We are only two to three months into this and my heart already feels thinned. Heavy. Not burdened all the time, although when the full weight certain heavy matters really sits upon it, then yes, burdened. But mostly in the quiet space at the end of day, when my constant fluttering about has subsided, it gets really heavy, like right before a good cry. And it longs and it calls and it does cry out all the way across cultures and cities and countries and oceans to find two small babies, or maybe young toddlers, that may not even be born yet, but who are my own. I see their faces – mash-ups of pictures of all the beautiful Rwandan babies and children I've seen. I call them by names. They are real children, not cast asides, not nobodies, but valuable children with unique spirits, created by God and we are privileged enough to get to raise them. The yearning to hold them, to love them, to tell them they are safe and loved, to protect them from every harm, is ever present; it is on the tip of my heart, at the depth of my heart. These children are already mine. Signed. Sealed. Now they just need to be delivered. And waiting for that is hard. Really hard.