She's matched

Yesterday we found out that Bella is matched with her family.  I had to go to the orphanage for a meeting and when I got there they handed me a box filled with beautiful clothes and a toy from them to her.  It also included a letter.  (Which the family wrote in English, a company in China translated into Chinese and then I read it and translated it back into English in my head, haha) 

When I read the letter in the taxi on the way home is when the tears started to flow and they just came off and on throughout the afternoon and evening.  It’s all so emotional.

It was really the first time I’d heard someone else call Bella “our little girl”.  She’s no longer just mine.  But in all reality, it’s another reminder that she is and always will be His.  I know they’ve been waiting a very long time for her, likely six years or more.  My two plus year wait has been agonizing enough.  Waiting causes your heart to long and anticipate.  They now wait with joy and excitement and the days left until they come to get her cannot come fast enough.  We now wait with sadness.  Our days with her are numbered.  This goodbye will likely be the hardest thing the Lord has asked us to do, and so I would love these days to drag on and on.  So my tears are for sure, tears of sadness.

But they are also tears of joy.  She is loved and wanted, not only by us, but now by them and their friends and family.  She will be cared for and provided for all the days of her life.  In the true sense of the word, she hasn’t been an orphan since the day she entered our home.  And very soon she will legally, permanently and forever be a daughter. 

The Journey of Grief

 (by Mark)

It often starts with a simple phrase… “OH God NO!”.   It is a plea, an expression of shock, an admission that though not fully realized, life has changed.  I remember saying it on 9/11, I remember speaking it after hearing my grandmother had cancer, I remember pleading it after getting the news we wouldn’t be able to adopt Bella.  In some ways it is a last ditch effort to return to life as before, and in another way it is the beginning of grief.  It is the acknowledgement of loss and the beginning of the changing of the life you once knew.  Over the course of the months following one truth sinks deeper and deeper into your soul, making more and more profound an impact on your heart.  It is the reality that you can never go back.  To be truthful, in some cases there is happy resolution… a curing of cancer, a restoring of property lost in a fire.  However, one is still profoundly affected by these events.  Something is still lost.  In many other situations though, resolution of this reality is a hard process that can take years to truly make peace with.  We build memorials, monuments and scrapbooks to help remember.  We seek counseling, entertainment and medication to forget.  We seek to rectify our shattered world with the continued passing of the world around us.  Life goes on.  Whether we want it to or not.  And I guess that is where so much of the pain can come from.  There is the pain of loss.  There is also the pain of the coldness of the natural world… where time and seasons move on, unfeeling, uncaring and insensitive to where one might be in the process.  People too, move on.  They are not uncaring, but they have lives too.  As much as you might want to stop and linger, to bask in what is left of the person, dream or former reality, life goes on. 

I have found immense comfort in one marvelous thought in my process.  Jesus does not move on.  Profoundly, as one outside of time, he exists eternally in every moment.  He is as much in the past as in the future as he is with me here now at 5am while I type.  So too, he does not emotionally move on.  He is with me moment by moment, and he grieves the loss, my loss and the loss to the world that sin and brokenness bring.  Just as he weeps for Lazarus or Jerusalem, he also weeps for Bella and for us.  He weeps for her abandonment as an infant, he weeps for her time in an orphanage, he weeps that loving parents will not be able to keep her.  He weeps in all these things even knowing that HE is making all things new, HE is working all things for our good, HE is there in the future when resolution will take place.  He keeps a perfect balance of remembering and hoping, knowing there are greater things, better days that may never be seen this side of heaven.  I cannot imagine where comfort might come were I not to know Him.