Great Expectations, Part 4: Community

We're in hospital again, having finished surgery number 2 for FuXia this year.  There is much to ponder, much to consider about parenting children from hard places who have special needs.  Meanwhile, this is my first chance in some time to pause and consider again the expectations I had going into adoption and how they've been redefined.

An adoption journey tends to foster community.  Friends and family take interest and former draw in close to cheer you on your way.  Your community of worship takes interest, perhaps, and supports you in a myriad of ways.  You begin to make new friends by way of adoption and, if you choose, blogging.  If your child has special needs, you often meet new friends through that process.  We even met new friends through the foster home where our children first lived!

It can be overwhelming, this community, in its numbers, and at the same time it can be so quieting to know in a hard or dark moment the friends who pray and the friends who share in common and the friends who hope; there is much hope, too, in being able to pray for others.  When we came home from China the first time, and our entire Sunday School class surprised us with the makeover they gave our home, we were overwhelmed.  How do you say "Thank you" for a gift that plays out as support on a daily basis even now, four years later?  Come to think of it, how do you continue to live and speak in thanks four years later, when that same group of people are still asking how they can love and pray for and help your family?  It is a humbling, if not bewildering, experience.

I don't know if it's the Southerner in me, or if it's the sequential way in which we train ourselves to view life, but that moment of arriving home to our beautifully remodeled house in 2008 was a once-in-a-lifetime moment.  It's the kind of moment that tempts you to surmise, "That's what it was all leading up to," or, "That's when everything came together."  It seems like the perfect moment, the apex, the best.

And then the need continues.  That moment, or the one when people helped build our porch, or the one where our yard was landscaped, or the one where different friends shared financially, makes the dailiness of our ongoing journey seem unfaithful, almost.  Why on earth would anyone spend a month of Saturdays and a good chunk of hard-earned money, to make our home easier to live in, or our adoption feasible, if the complications of our life are just going to keep spilling out?  It offends some sensibility deep in me that obviously has little to do with grace.  I have not embraced the freedom of hope enough to breathe through this living and giving without wrestling with guilt over not being able to provide everything my family needs by myself.  There are times when I reflect and give thanks deep within for the gifts we've been given and the manner in which people continue to ask how we are doing, and then suddenly I will find myself struggling with embarrassment over the fact of our evolving medical journey.  Why is that?  Is it that I'm afraid someone will feel compelled to send money, and I need to be in control of not letting that happen?  Do I feel that we somehow, having struggled with our beliefs and faith as we adopted, should have had smoother sailing as a reward for our risk?  Is it that I like to have attention when I'm joking or story-telling (again, in control), but not when there's a real need I can't fix?

What a wonderful giving and breaking gift is Community!  This life with my husband and my boys is not episodic, and though we will embrace and rejoice over the once-in-a-lifetime LOVE our community has repeatedly shown us, somehow, ridiculously, we'll still wake up tomorrow with needs and fears and bills!  And yet, our Community loves us each day, and prays, offering fellowship and down-time, herb planters and date-nights and spontaneous apple pie deliveries!  Every day brings encouragement and new hope.

What on earth is this!?

It is love.  Love for our neighbors as much as ourselves, lived out by friends and family, lived out knowing that life does not encapsulate neatly, and that giving and loving is not such a linear thing.

There is not so much a once-in-a-lifetime moment.  It is living the lifetime together.  I had no idea it could look like this, and it challenges my pride and my understanding of faith.