For the record, I think about writing here at least every other day. Often I do not because it just sounds like complaining over and over and over. But more often I must choose which priority I’m going to put my energy into. Recreating and fine-tuning our parent profile? Researching other profiles, adoption agencies, adoption facilitators, surrogates, lawyers? Make a meal to last the next few days? Usually the parent profile wins. It takes an unbelievable amount of time and thought. Gathering and scanning pictures, choosing existing ones, which ones to actually use that make us look awesome? What to write that will not only be a true reflection of who we are individually and together, but that will attract a birthparent’s heart? Or at the very least not turn them off? This may come as a surprise to most of you, but I tend to be wordy. (“Noooo!! Wordy? You?!”) So it’s hard for me to trim Us down to a paragraph or four. Brad is much better at it. Anyway...that’s where most of my creative and focused time and energy has gone lately. Sorry for being so absent here.
In my head, I’ve been documenting for you all the change of season. A couple of weeks ago I noticed we had some party-hearty trees that didn’t care a whit about fashion and were taking it all off and going “branch naked” early on. Some are more modest, shedding just their tree hats and scarves before going The Full Monty sometime this week or next. But almost all turned on their true colors this year. It’s been the most beautiful autumn here that I can remember. I notice that I’m letting myself take it in. Letting myself enjoy the color, the smell, the crispness in the air (when it’s not 75 degrees like its been this last week!). I notice that I can have both. The beauty and the sadness. I can wish that Anna were here to play in the leaves and still appreciate being outdoors. I can cry her out and absorb autumn in at the same time.
That's progress, right?
It also hit me one day driving down the street that before death, there is this Blaze of Glory. How had I missed that all this time? That in nature, both birth and death are marked with a glorious sort of beautiful? Spring is unequivocally stunning in its color and vibrancy. Every flower, every new leaf poking out its branch, every plant is something to be celebrated and reveled in. So it is with birth, is it not? And with every subsequent new little skill our babies master without us so much as thinking to teach it. Very often death in animals and humans is not nearly so striking as nature's version, and even in nature Fall is more 'mature' and somber than Spring in its color and ceremony. But is that the lesson? That though we may not be able to see it, we are in fact leaving in a blaze of glory to the hereafter? That the glory is going home to God? Did God create Spring and Fall as they are to utterly surround us in this knowledge when we do not consciously recognize it? To show us how it works? To provide solace, comfort, hope, even joy in BOTH events?
Now there is an aspect of God I can rest in.
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