January 26th ~ The Day that Changed My Life Forever...Literally.

It was a little after 6:30 when she arrived.
The first day of the first yes of our foster care journey...

My first time to hold Makayla

At the very same moment, a Chinese beauty was celebrating her 13th birthday, unaware she would grace our home in only five short days.

                 

I opened my door on that January 26th, thinking it was about me. The ways I would fix, I would love, and I would bring God glory.

And in a way, it was about me, but not how I thought.

Rather than fixing, it would be me that was broken, again, and again, and again.

Rather than me loving from my strength, it was the first of hundreds of days that I realized I trust in a Father who does give me more than I can handle. He brings me to the end so that He may begin.

Rather than the ways I would bring Him glory, I discovered that He doesn't need me to bring Him glory, but He creates spaces of His restoration story to where He gently invites me.

I scripted that placement to the last detail and told the Father the ways it should go, but it would end very different than I dreamed.

Rather than tucking that little bambina in each night, I'm wading through life with her sisters, brother and grandmother. 

Rather than bringing her to a place I consider safe and secure, God used her to immerse me into a world of shattered dreams and splintered lives, where the shelter of His wings is the only safe place.

I often think back to how different my life was between January 25th and January 26th of that year. I know I can never go back to the way life was on the 25th, but it's a sobering reality how so often we as Christians consider we have the right to retreat from the spheres of brokenness to which we have been exposed, where we have been invited to be the light.

These spaces are hard, so very hard.

But they are the spaces we drink deeply of our Savior, the places that crave the light we bear because of Him.

The reality is, once you have followed your Maker into the places He allows you to be an agent of change, an Ambassador of Hope, the desperation of this world without your Savior is forever chiseled into your soul. You haltingly realize you were never designed for a cushy, safe, comfortable life...you were crafted with detail to bring the rivers of life to the deserts of death.

That realization shatters the life you once knew; you are forever changed, to never go back.

Because He is Worthy ~