When I take personality tests, I always bust the matrix. Just when they almost have me all figured out, I answer “strongly disagree” and the whole trajectory falls apart. On question #9, “I do a thorough job, valuing completion,” and on #10, “I am easily overwhelmed and often abandon projects.” I love people, sometimes, just certain ones. I am creative, except when I get stuck in a rut. I am kind, except when I’m mean. I am comfortable socially, but I’m a 75% introvert. I was always a super straight square, but I chose friends (and boyfriends) (and a husband) who were naughty.

And my whole life, I’ve been a total rule follower. Except when I’m so not.

You may not be shocked to hear that my teachers never really liked me, and they were often surprised I was smart. (My college professor examining my resume my senior year: “Really? Magna Cum Laude? Seriously?”) Perhaps this was because I would lay my head down and fall dead asleep in the middle of their lectures, or sail a note across the room to my friend while they were watching. Maybe they didn’t like the sullen girl who rolled her eyes and SIGHED VERY LOUDLY at the question-asker who lobbed her burning inquiry up with twelve seconds left in class.

Which is all very weird because I love to learn. (Certain things.)

And I’m a people pleaser. (But only sometimes.)

So it has delighted and amused me to receive a deluge of emails from 7 readers, professing their consent while confessing their shortcomings as they’ve launched into their own little mutinies against excess. It appears you are selective rule-followers too, cherry-pickers if you will. You like the ideas, but not the ones that make you give up coffee. You are all for spending less, except for restaurants and stores. For instance, from Twitter and Facebook friends just in the last few days:

Re: 7 month 3: If I buy I Coach purse, I won't have a problem giving away the rest of mine. #failingalready

First day of #7 and I have a Superbowl-gluttony-food-hangover. Oh, this is gonna take a lot of Jesus and spiritual caffeine.

Halfway through the book, and my wife already gave away half our clothes. WHATEVER. #classichusbandquote

Is this a book a nerdish football fanatic/Popsicle enthusiast such as myself would enjoy? Otherwise, I’m out.

Reading Food ch. of #7 & had to put it down. Had to finish Skittles before I could read in good conscience. #ohtheirony #repent

I bought the boots I had my eye on and felt a twinge of conviction at the checkout. It was probably the Holy Spirit, but I blamed your book instead, and may or may not have cursed your name under my breath. I'm going to hurry up and wear them a few times before I start your book, so I won't be able to return them.

These make me laugh every single day. People, I said 100 times that 7 wasn’t a template, wasn’t a prescription, wasn’t a challenge, wasn’t a program. I find it hilarious that most readers have jumped in, excited to emulate the experiment…sort of. You’re busting the matrix. You are so my people.

So I’m coming to your rescue today with seven mini-7-projects (See what I just did? That’s called synergy, y’all), giving you a pass from the Seven-Month Full Monty Version For Crazy People, and offering some simple, easily implemented ideas you can choose from without being labeled a “hippie granola” or “Commie Socialist.” If your mind is spinning and you need a focal point other than simply grabbing trash bags and throwing in everything you own, try just one of these on for size:

1. Pick one item you buy regularly, and go without it for a month. Reallocate the savings. (One reader went without soda, calculated the savings at $34 a month, which turned out to be the exact amount needed to sponsor a Compassion child. AWESOME SAUCE.)

2. Help a family in need. Call the counselor at the poorest school in your city and ask if he/she has a student or family with specific needs you might be able to meet. I am getting the coolest emails about folks doing this, taken from a tiny paragraph on page 92 in 7, ironically, the year I graduated from high school. Ninety-two! Ninety-two! Ninety ninety ninety ninety ninety-two!

3. Put a "cell phone bowl" near your front door with this sign: "Be with the ones who are here." Ask family members and guests to leave their phones there as they enter. Maybe include a shelf for laptops if that is your poison.

4. Commit to eating the food you already have as well as all leftovers for two weeks. This throws a wrench in the waste machine. We often have a freezer, fridge, and pantry full of food and exclaim, “We don’t have anything to eat!” Bull butter. (I am currently doing this too. Last night, we had shrimp gumbo I had in the freezer, but we were out of rice and bread. So we ate it over pasta. With tortillas. It was Cajun Mextalian. Solidarity, people.)

5. Declare "screen free days" for your family: Pick two days with no TV, gaming, computers, phone apps, and games. Intentionally fill that space with time together. If you aren’t scared of a revolt, pick three days.

6. Freeze spending—do not buy anything you don’t need for a month (clothes, shoes, whatever). This stops the hemorrhaging so you can breathe and think. Just press pause and see what happens.

I’m super excited about Tip #7, so it is getting its own section. The most frequent response from 7 readers is that they just started purging the stacks, piles, drawers, and closets full of stuff until they knew what to do next. And I started thinking…

What if we harnessed this response for great good?

Because here is the deal: all those clothes and sheets and pots and mattresses and bicycles and jewelry represent a bunch of potential cash. We’ve already spent money on it once. What if we found a way to redeem those expenditures for something good and noble? Rather than simply gnashing our teeth and wailing over the indulgence of it all, what if we rolled up our sleeves and converted it to mission?

Enter my friends at Help End Local Poverty (H.E.L.P.), whose mission is this: “To be a global tribe dedicated to ending extreme poverty by helping to rescue orphans, restore their hope, and renew their communities.” They are pioneering innovative, sustainable initiatives in Haiti, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. They are bad to the bone and I want to be exactly like them when I grow up.

As you might remember, I’m into orphans.

And this Zimbabwe punkin’ we sponsor through H.E.L.P.:

And these two Indian doll babies we sponsor through The Miracle Foundation:

H.E.L.P. has this smart idea: Use our excess to serve the poor. Clever, right? And this is how: Garage Sale for Orphans. Sell what we’ve already bought and give the money to support the most vulnerable kids on earth.

There is a paper-thin line between orphans and human trafficking. Kids on the streets or those just aged-out of the system, children with no options and no advocates, are targeted almost immediately for sex and labor trafficking. They are exploited and abused relentlessly, low-hanging fruit for predators.

H.E.L.P. is stepping in, building safe homes in Haiti for the whopping price of $6000 each, out the door. This is how Chris Marlow, founder of H.E.L.P., explains it:

One of the best and most effective ways to fight trafficking is to prevent trafficking in the first place. Traffickers TARGET orphaned children.

We will build these homes within 20 minutes of the Dominican border. Kids are being sold at this border right now, into the Dominican Republic, where they will become sex and labor slaves. H.E.L.P., in partnership with Austin New Church and Restore.com, is going to build 12 preventative safe homes in 2012.

We will rescue "the worst case scenarios" orphans - kids that are homeless, doubled-orphaned, abandoned, etc. And we will rescue girls that age out of their current orphanage. Which means: 12- and 13-year-old girls kicked out of the orphanage because they're too old. These girls usually become prostitutes locally in Haiti or sold into the DR.

Each home will have an overseer, or house mom/dad, potentially a widow. We hope to create a family style orphan care. Our local leader in Haiti will oversee the entire project. The kids will be sponsored, so they will get food, water, clothing, and will also be able to attend school. Once we rescue a child, we will raise that child until they graduate college or trade school, so they can then take care of their own families.

DUDE.

Good reader, let’s knock out one of those homes together, yes? Two? Five? And by the revolutionary idea of selling what we’ve already bought. Redemption! What if we took trash bags and dollies through our homes and purged, purged, purged, converting our indulgences into bricks and mortar and safety and a future for these precious, beloved-by-Jesus Haitian girls? Plain old garage sales, reimagined. (Our little church does this once a year as a community and raised 12K in four hours. From our excess, yall. &!%$#.)

You could do this with your little family. Or your community group. Or your neighbors. Or your soccer team. Or your Bible study group. Or your book club. Or your sisters. Gather the troops, price everything to sell, and turn your shoes and books and couches into cinder blocks and plaster and a roof.

H.E.L.P. set up a project page just for us, 7 Readers and Doers. The goal is 6K…one house. We could blow right past that if we all got crazy. Maybe you make $200 on your sale. Or perhaps you are a freak of nature like my friend Jenny who has never made less than a grand on any garage sale ever. Add it all together – your stuff, my stuff, their stuff – and we could do something amazing, literally changing girls’ lives who are headed into the sex trade as seventh graders otherwise.

Sell your stuff.

Go here and donate the proceeds. Or just donate period. For real, man. (Snag the button for your blog and trick your readers into joining us.)

Together, we’ll watch the little orange line move to “100% funded.”

And maybe we’ll need to start a new page for a second house.

So, the 7th tip (synergy again) (which is a word I keep including for 7 readers who are familiar with my horrid confession on page 204):

7. Turn your excess into justice. Help build a safe house for the most vulnerable Haitian girls through the Garage Sale for Orphans initiative at H.E.L.P.

Isn’t this fun? We have the potential to be the answer to so many problems. What we can pull off together is so powerful. I believe this is the gospel Jesus has called us to, the one burgeoning with teaching, proclaiming, feeding, housing, loving, sharing, studying, and worshipping. This gospel combines learning with loving, studying with serving; it emulates a Savior who fed and healed and touched and restored…AND taught and proclaimed and challenged and led. It is born in our hearts, expanded in our minds, declared with our mouths, and transferred to our hands.

It’s such an exciting, stirring time to follow Jesus, isn’t it?



See anything you might try? Or mind sharing what you’ve already done? How about sharing this blog with your people so we can KNOCK OUT THAT SAFE HOUSE IN HAITI?

For some time, I’ve had this feeling messing with my faith. That one when you’re trying really hard and adhering to most of the rules and checking a lot of boxes, I mean, some boxes that seem really important, legit boxes, and yet…I don’t know. Something feels wrong. The mechanism is off. The parts are not creating the whole like people said it would. And despite my best efforts to kick that self-condemnation thing, I can't help but think:

To the other 99%, it’s probably obvious, but for me in my privileged 1% demographic, it left me puzzled and frustrated and discouraged. A bunch of my generation, millions if you want to get nitpicky, up and left the church over it, because the template didn’t end up changing the world or even changing lives. It left us with a laundry list of behaviors but conspicuously ignored way too many elephants in the room to be taken seriously. For me, the tension had many facets:

Why are we still starving for nourishment after our sixth Bible study in a row? How can people supposedly filled with the Spirit be so enamored with the luxuries of this world to the detriment of the other 99% who suffer so? How can be the richest people on earth still be so unhappy? Does my craving for more neutralize the enough that Jesus says He is? If I'm patterned after my Savior, why does my life look exactly like everyone else's, with the exception of some stellar church attendance? The tension finally pinpointed here:

As believers in the western church, how can we have so much and do so little with it?

We have so freaking much. So much money, education, resources, opportunities, knowledge, possessions, gifts, consumer power, privileges, advantages. We have every tool at our disposal, yet we are chronically plagued by ailments - social, spiritual, physical, emotional. Good reader, hands up if your heart is too peaceful, your life too simplified, your hands too generous, your spirit too content, your space too sacred, your stuff too unimportant, your devotion to Jesus too concentrated. Millions of voices are raising, some publicly, some in private turmoil still searching for the words, saying:

Enough.

Enough with the obscene excess while the rest of the world is burning down outside our windows. Enough with the waste as 25,000 people die today of hunger, while I throw away another pound of food we didn’t get around to eating. Enough with the debt, the spending, the amassing, the irresponsibility, the indulgence, the fake discipleship, the rat race, the hamster wheel, the power and positioning and posturing with a hunger still for more, more, more, all the while pretending to follow a Jesus who didn’t even have a place to lay his head.

This started making me crazy. I just wanted to be more like Jesus...except when I didn't.

*Sigh*

For the love of Michael, it's such a battle to be human and love Jesus well, isn't it? For people mired in luxury and privileges, the gospel is dangerously simple. It completely fails to secure our station. It's like it doesn't even care. It doesn't offer the exemptions I'm comfortable with or the clauses that keep everything decent. Worse, it outright threatens a bunch of things I like. I mean, I really like them and Jesus doesn't seem to give a flip. In fact, he talks kind of ugly about rich people and seems to think we will have the very hardest time finding his kingdom... the.very.hardest.time. Harder than a camel fitting through the eye of a needle. Harder than that. I'm no scientist, but one of these things appears harder, and Jesus chose the other one.

Now I'm freaked out, because Jesus also said, listen, a bunch of people think they are following me, that they "get" the gospel, but they so don't and are actually extremely self-deceived because you cannot love God and money. I'm not even playing. You cannot. You cannot say you love me yet hate your brother. That makes you a liar, not a disciple. The way is narrow. Kate Moss narrow. Few will find it, and the richer you are, sorry, but the harder it's going to be for you to actually give up everything you have and follow me, because you have so much to lose.

This stuff makes me hyperventilate, not just because Jesus said it, but because I feel it.

So my little family said, God, if too much stuff is standing in the way of your kingdom coming in our lives, then help us break up with it. If it has stolen our allegience and hijacked our obedience, give us the courage to wage war against everything that is ruining us for your gospel, substituting comfort for bravery, aquiring for sharing, appearances for obedience, personal glory for worship.

Enter 7.

A seven-month experimental mutiny against excess, tackling seven areas of overconsumption in the spirit of a fast; a fast from greed, irresponsibility, apathy, and insatiability. Each area boiled down to just seven choices for a month:

Food.
Clothes.
Possessions.
Media.
Waste.
Spending.
Stress.

Only seven foods for a month. Only seven pieces of clothes for a month. Give away seven things we own a day for a month. Eliminate seven forms of media for a month. Adopt seven substantial habits for a greener life. Spend money in only seven places. Practice "seven sacred pauses" a day and observe the Sabbath...a deeply reduced life to find a greatly increased God.

I don't know how else to talk about 7 other than to say it changed our lives. The discipline of fasting from such cherished, abused luxuries was transformative in the most difficult, painful, beautiful way. It shined a spotlight on dark corners, corners I wanted hidden and kept from scrutiny. 7 held my life up to God's Word and said, "One of these things is not like the other." It pried our eyes open to needs and abuses and the far reaching effects of unchecked consumerism, and it would not let them close again in ignorance or obstinance, I tell you. It hurt. We bled out in parts. We celebrated in others. We pushed through the chaos of repentence and found liberation waiting on the other side.

I put it so humbly, so gently in your hands.

I simply cannot tell you how much I wish I could control your reaction to 7. With every thump of my beating heart, I hope you'll receive it like I'm offering it. This is not a template. This is not a formula. This is not a guilt-mongering, sanctimonious rant. 7 is not a prescription. I wrote it humbly, saturated in repentance, face down.

I wish I could sit next to you as you read it and explain things better, and then we could talk about it for hours, dreaming and scheming together. I wish you understood that my life is messy and so often I still feel like I am barely failing forward. I wish you would stop posting on Twitter and Facebook about how reading 7 on your Kindle makes you feel weird. Stop saying your Kindle makes you feel bad, man. I have a Kindle. Do you understand what I am saying?

This so isn't about some getting it wrong and us getting it right, because we are still struggling and wrestling and trying to choose 'dying to self' each day but often choosing just 'plain self' instead. I also wish I could stop you from turning a critical eye toward my little family, because writing this from the middle of the pack meant setting myself up as a hypocrite for everyone to scrutinize. And you'd be right. You would be so right, Jack.

That's why this cannot be about me. I'm a barely passable representative of the gospel. I'm struggling with the same tension and the same sin issues and the same double standards as everyone else. I just happened to have a laptop and a willing publisher and an editor who deleted all the ellipses I included. Please let's not compare or judge or self-condemn. Oh my stars, no self-condemnation, do you hear me? If you take the guilt route I will jump into an icy river and drown myself. Like I wrote in 7: Don't imagine I'm writing from the cardboard house I chose to live in next to the homeless refugees I feed with money diverted from our health insurance. Everyone be cool.

7 is for my brothers (yes it is, dudes...this is no chick book) and sisters who are looking around saying, "Something feels wrong about being at the top of the food chain and still clamoring for one more rung." I'm saying that. A bunch of you are saying that too. We are in this together. I have this vision of thousands, millions of us throwing wrenches in the machine and refusing complicity in the ravaging of the earth and its precious inhabitants. I see us transitioning bravely from the screaming voice that yells ME to the quiet one whispering we, the marginalized voice of the international community we belong to. I see us grabbing our friends and families and dreaming up ways to unhook from the system; I envision late night discussions between couples and roommates and sisters asking "what if?". I imagine a generation realizing that private consumer choices have social consequences and public outcomes, and when Jesus called the poor his brothers and sisters and our neighbors, those relational metaphors included deep ramifications for the way we spend our time, our money, our lives.

This is for people who are just ready. Maybe you've managed the tension as long as you can, and it's breaking you. Or you walked away from the church, hungry for Jesus but disenfranchised from a system that builds 60 million dollar buildings while the earth is groaning for intervention from the Bride. Perhaps you haven't even had the words yet, but your spirit is restless, roving. You could be like me and Brandon; frustrated with the ethos of the church, but in our most honest moments admitting we are part of the problem. Maybe you are looking at your storage unit, holding things that can't even fit into your house anymore, wondering what the point of all this is. Or you are camped under the steeple and still can't find God.

I believe something exciting is happening. I see it everywhere; I hear its whispers. And not just from the young revolutionaries, but from soccer moms, pastors, men in suits, students, urbanites, country folk, old, young, left, right, Christ-followers everywhere. God is stirring and moving us together. He wants to save our lives and save the world, and if the treasures of this earth are holding us back from the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit, setting our lives ablaze and sending us to the ends of the earth, Good News in the flesh like Jesus, then maybe it's time to wage war.

Join me. Let's start a little revolution.

About this time of year, I become terribly enamored with people’s End of Year Lists shared on the interwebs (Top Ten Books I Read in 2011, Top Five Influencers in My Life This Year, Top Twenty Songs that Mattered in 2011). These blogs and articles discuss issues that matter, helping humanity evolve into a kinder, braver species. They give readers edifying information, important thinkers to listen to, profound books to read, noteworthy leaders to follow. These writers take their platforms and use their influence for great good. I admire them so much.

I’m joining their ranks, but with *slightly* less necessary information.

People, I have issues, and I believe it is time to air them. I’ve covered plenty of serious material on this blog, like this and this and this. I might have even tricked some readers into believing I operate only in deep thoughts and serious scholarship. Some of you haven’t recovered from my last post, when my family jumped off Santa’s sleigh and half the world came apart at the seams (let it never be said that I don’t employ a healthy amount of melodrama). So it’s time for some lighter fare, or as one of my commenters said on a previous blog about adoption: “You are the worst writer I’ve ever seen! This is exactly what I would expect from a girl from Texas, land of big hair bows and empty brains.” Good reader, I shall dabble in that of which you speak.

Here’s the deal: I’m plagued by a few idiosyncrasies, certain quirks, if you will. I exhibit some behaviors and tendencies that cause people to say, “Really? Get a grip.” I’m daring to believe there are more of you out there, and hear me say right up front: I expect you to offer some quid pro quo at the end of this little piece, because nothing fuels our eccentricities more than another human saying, “You think that’s weird? I’ve saved all my toenail clippings since 1991.”

So without further ado, I give you: Jen’s Five Top Quirks of 2011 (ok, and forever):

1. I’ve let on that I’m not a hovering Mama. My kids slide down banisters and build skateboard ramps and shoot each other with airsoft guns. I parent this behavior by saying, “Don’t cry about it if you get hurt. Or cry in your room where I can’t hear you.” But I have two issues that make me a candidate for Most Neurotic, Controlling Mom Ever: my kids’ sleep and their body temperature.

Since the day they were born, I’ve been a sleep Nazi. I count their hours. I watch the clock. When someone with credentials said, “Children needed ten hours of sleep at night. Believe me”…I did. I believed. I’m a believer. I enjoy my true comfort zone when they get twelve hours. I spaz out – one might say irrationally – when bedtime boundaries get pushed past my liking: “OHMYWORD. It’s 10:13pm and Gavin is still up. We might as well keep him home tomorrow, because he will not be able to lift his head from exhaustion.” I am a freak about a good night’s sleep. A full freak.

Also? I have a very weird fixation about their body temperature. Are you hot? Are you cold? Are you feeling chilly? Are you overheating? Do you need a coat? Where is your coat? Give me your coat. Are you hot? Take off your undershirt. Do you need some water? Do you need to sit in the shade? Do you need to sit in the sun? Do you have enough blankets? Is this blanket too heavy? If you get hot, push this blanket down. If you get cold, here is an extra blanket. Are you hands cold? Are your feet hot? You need a hat. Put on this hat. You can’t go out if you don’t wear this hat. Take off your hat; it’s too hot outside.

After asking Ben about his heat level 28 times from the sidelines at his soccer game, my friend Tonya was like, “Oh my gosh, Jen! Crazy alert! Leave him alone! You are even freaking me out.” I believe she was one second away from slapping me across the face.

I evidently don’t care a whit about other issues, for example, safety or ingesting poisons. This clearly doesn’t bother me:

My kids could jump from a second-story window onto a mattress below while testing the feasibility of wind-resistant capes/umbrellas, and I believe my only concern would be if they were getting too hot or if was getting too close to bedtime.

2. For nearly my entire adult life, I’ve lived in Austin, “Live Music Capital of the World.” We are chock-full of serious musicians and indy singer-songwriters. We have actual producers and artists in our immediate friend circle. I can listen to interesting, unique, creative music any night of the week at two-dozen different venues. Austin hosts ACL and SXSW, two of the best music festivals in the country. This is a city where musical taste matters and is evaluated as a potential character flaw.

I love Top 40.

Like, love it. The sillier, the boppier, the more likely a twelve-year-old girl will have their poster on her walls, the higher the band is on my Love List. If it’s in Tiger Beat, I’m down. Almost every song I love ends up on a Kidz Bop CD. My musical preferences are fully juvenile and unsophisticated. My friends groove to bands called My Morning Jacket and Fleet Foxes, discussing the genius of the songwriting and creative brilliance. You know what I love? A sixteen-year old covering a Bruno Mars song on American Idol. (My friend Andy is a musician’s musician, and when Brandon mentioned my AI obsession and Andy gave me that look, I yelled at Brandon, “Why did you out me! I want him to take me seriously and now he pities me!”) Sydney, my sixth grader, and I were talking to a friend who casually mentioned Maroon 5 was coming to Austin, and we screamed in unison, “OH MY GAH!!!!”

Yes, I turn the channel when the raunchy fare comes on, and even I cannot listen to K$sha, but Flo Rida? Get in my ears. And don't mind me while I dance and sing at the top of my lungs. Whatever. This is my jam, keep me partying till the a.m. Yall don’t understand, make me throw my hands in the ayer, ay-ayer, ayer, ay-ayer…

3. This is unfortunate, because I’ve gone and put five kids in this family, but I have a teeny, tiny issue with sound. I call it Noise Pollution, and it makes me a little bit of a crazy person. White, background noise has been known to make me unravel like a lunatic. My family has been carrying on, just going about their business, talking to each other with a show on the TV and living a normal life, when all of a sudden, with no warning or even any red flags indicating an impending meltdown, I’ve flown into their midst like the Wicked Witch snatching remote controls out of hands, turning off every beeping, clicking, humming, buzzing, ticking electronic or instrument offending me, yelling at everyone about appropriate sound levels and demanding to know if they think causing deafness and anxiety in other human beings is acceptable. Usually, six bewildered people look back at me with mouths hanging open, as it might appear the punishment did not fit the crime.

Except that it so did.

The amount of sound trapped in my car between kids + music has actually made me consider sticking knitting needles into my eardrums. Once, the unceasing noise enclosed in the small space of my car pushed me to such despair, I pulled over on the side of I-35, locked my children in the car, walked fifty feet away and sat in the grass bawling, while my kids pressed their faces to the windows mouthing, “MOMMY! MOMMY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MOMMY?!”

I cannot write one word, not one, if there is a single decibel of sound in the room. What? Try a little quiet Adele in the background? Are you trying to sabotage my career? Because that is what would happen. I would start typing song lyrics and lose fifteen minutes thinking about how to kidnap Adele and lock her in my closet and make her sing to me whenever I just feel like rolling in the deep because no one in my house understands me. I need an empty, dead silent house to eek out a ten-word sentence, so when “someone” who lives here with me, who doesn’t go to school and is sometimes home during the day when the quiet space is possible keeps asking me questions like how do you spell in lieu of and did you put that thing in our shared iCalendar and I’m thinking about getting a new tattoo, I might accidentally come freaking unglued and threaten to move into an apartment. (This scenario is hypothetical.) (No it’s not.)

4. I love humor. I love to laugh. I love funny, stupid movies. I love funny people. I love sarcasm and banter. I love witticisms. I love Will Ferrell. I love banal comedy. I am a recent convert to Melissa McCarthy and plan to be her loyal disciple until I die. I believe laughter is the best medicine, and laugh and the world laughs with you, or some such.

But I cannot handle pranks. Can. Not. Even. Handle. Them.

Remember The Tom Green Show and Punk’d and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? These shows almost put me into a coma. When a bunch of people are in on it, and one person doesn’t know it, and they are forced into an awkward/horrifying/embarrassing/confusing/distressing situation, AND IT IS BEING FILMED, I start praying for the rapture. My anxiety goes straight through the roof. I spontaneously develop hysterical psychosis.

When we were caught in massive delays for our son’s adoption, my friend Missy decided to post a funny Youtube video on my Facebook wall every day until we passed court. It was her Youtube Ministry, and it gave us such gems as this:

But a couple of months in, she started posting some prank videos, and they strangely drew no response from me. Finally she was like, What up, Mrs. Ungrateful?? That video was GOLD and you didn’t even comment! And I was all, I JUST CAN’T DO IT, OKAY? *in a small voice*…I couldn’t even watch. Then she was like, you’re weird, weirdo.

So please just note, if you invite me in on a prank, I will be voted Most Likely To Prematurely Yell At The Top Of My Lungs:

It’s not true! She’s not really hurt!
Oh my gosh! It’s not even your real car!
The waiter is an actor!
Don’t cuss! He’s not cheating on you!

I will ruin the prank. Count on it. And if you pull one on me, you’re dead to me.

5. So, I hate good-byes. And not just the legitimate kind like when someone is moving to Boston or going back home after visiting. I just hate them all. I can’t explain this. I am absolutely that person who slips out of a party like a ninja rather than doing a big good-bye scene, which if you’re still with me and on your toes, you might recognize is WAY WORSE. If my purse is in the hostess’s line of vision and Brandon won’t indulge my eccentric exit habits by getting it for me, I will leave it behind and make her put it on her porch where I can retrieve it the next day. I can’t tell you how many texts like these I’ve received:

Hey! Where did you go?
Did you leave?
What happened to you?
Did someone kidnap you? Are you in a trunk?

Even if I am 100% positive that this is the last time I’ll see you for a year, your bags are packed and in your car, which is running, and everyone is buckled in except you, your husband is giving the wrap-it-up gesture, and we’re standing in front of your sold house where the moving van just pulled away to head to your new life in Atlanta, I will say, “Let’s just talk later. I’ll see you before you leave.” I will say this. I will find a way to not have the good-bye moment, even if it is clearly, clearly the good-bye moment.

I can talk in front of 5000 people without so much as twitch, but give me a farewell to navigate and I shut down, a tad bit fixated on just getting away to a safe place where no one is saying the good-bye words and/or watching me say the good-bye words and I’m just nice and happy in my own home, even though Brandon is all, knock it off and stop being rude and just get in there and say good-bye, and I’m like, I DON’T WANT TO AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME. I am like Rain Man and Brandon cannot handle my neuroses:

Charlie: What's it going to be Ray? What's it going to be?
Raymond: This is a very dangerous highway.
Charlie: How am I going to get to LA?
Raymond: Course driving your car on this interstate is very dangerous.
Charlie: You want to get off the highway will that make you happy?
Raymond: Yeah.
Charlie: Well, you gotta GET IN THE CAR SO THAT WE CAN GET OFF THE HIGHWAY!
Raymond: Course in 1986, 46,400 male drivers were definitely involved in fatal accidents.

Please someone diagnose what sort of weird social disorder I have.



So there you are, folks, the top five. Please trust me, there are many, many others, some that make even less sense than these. (I didn't even mention my physical need to use italics and ellipses. I can't explain my need to emote.) Now your job is to share your "issues," because I know you people are weirdos. I cannot be the only one.

What are your quirks, tendencies, neuroses, or bizarre fixations? And if you say “my strangest habit is being too kind,” I will delete your response. Fo’ realz. Spill it.

When I was in sixth grade, I received two Christmas presents I distinctly remember:

1.) The most coveted, desired beautiful "Forenza" tag on a pair of black leggings with a corresponding purple and black plaid shirt. (The outfit could've been anything, as long as it was from The Limited. Outback Red, anyone? Omg. If I could've conjured riches back then, I would've spent every red cent on OBR.)

2.) A fun, quirky red "football jersey type" sweatshirt.

I loved them both. Loved, loved, loved. I was certain these gifts were my ticket out of Dorkville. The feathered, product-less boy haircut and Bargain Selection glasses would become moot in light of my new, stylish garb. The popular kids would wonder what they ever didn't see in me. The cute boys I pined over would fight over inviting me to Sadie Hawkins, and they would say things like, "Why haven't we noticed her before? We're like Saul after the scales fell from his eyes." Or at least something very, very similar to that.

Until one very unfortunate eavesdropping session.

Supposed to be in bed but creeping in the hall listening to my parents' conversation which simply seemed like a naughty, awesome thing to do, I heard my mom say this:

"Her red sweatshirt? I found it at Walmart for $3.00."

Oh.
No.
She.
Didn't.

And just like that, the sweatshirt was ruined. In front of my eyes, it lost all its charm and it simply became something a Walmart girl would wear because she couldn't afford Esprit and her mother refused to buy her Guess jeans. All of a sudden, it communicated: I'm poor. (I was in sixth grade, people. It was a very dramatic time.)

Here's why I tell you about my persecutions: That is the only thing I remember from Christmas 1985. Not Jesus. Not reverence. Not generosity. Not gratitude. Just a selfish, materialistic reaction because every single gift of mine wasn't from an overpriced store with a namebrand I could casually brag about wearing. What a brat.

This sort of bull crap is still happening every year.

What happened to Christmas? What on earth happened to it? When did it transform from something simple and beautiful to what it is now? How insiduously did the enemy work to slowly hijack Jesus' birth and hand it over on a silver platter to Big Marketing, tricking His own followers into financing the confiscation?

We all know it. We all feel it. Every year we bear this tension. Each December, the world feels off kilter. But in the absence of a better plan or an alternative rhythm or - let's just say it - courage, we feed the machine yet again, giving Jesus lip service while teaching our kids to ask Santa for whatever they want, because, you know, that's really what Christmas boils down to.

I just cannot take it anymore, yall. I cannot.

What if a bunch of us pulled out of the system? What if we said something very radical and un-American, like: "Our family is going to celebrate Jesus this year in a manner worthy of a humble Savior who was born to two poor teenagers in a barn and yet still managed to rescue humanity."

I'm going to throw out some ideas for what I hope is a more meaningful Christmas; you may take some and leave some. Good reader, you may take none. Maybe you'll tweak an idea to fit your family. You might say, "For the love of Baby Jesus! She's ruining everything! We'll try one little thing this year, ok?! And then we'll quit reading her blog." Here goes:

1.) Because I'm anxious to make enemies and isolate myself from any goodwill you've ever felt toward me, let me just start with a biggie: We've pulled out of the Santa charade. Our newest kids are 5 and 8, preparing for their first Christmas in America, and we're just not doing it, yall. Maybe because we've spent the last four years trying to unravel the mess we've presented to our other kids all these years, but hear me say it: We are giving Christmas back to Jesus. Not a corner of it; all of it.

There is no fake benefactor this year my kids can petition to get more stuff. Because honestly? For a five-year-old, how can Jesus compete with Santa? Our children don't have spiritual perspective; when faced with the choice of allegience, they have a baby in a manger, or they can get a jolly, twinkling, flying character who will bring them presents. This is going to be an easy choice for them. My friend Andrew, who identifies himself as a member of the "non-believer corner" put it this way:

I always thought it was strange how Christians will tell me they have this giant and awesome truth they know is true deep in their soul and want to share with me, but when 12/25 comes around they lie to their own progeny because, apparently, that giant, liberating, and awesomely simple truth is somehow just not enough. It may be a good narrative, but it needs a little something to give it some panache.

As importantly, it sets this tone for Christmas: Be good and you'll get stuff, which becomes so deeply seeded, undoing that position is almost impossible. When we teach our children to understand Christmas through this lens, then tell them at nine-years-old: "Never mind! It's all fake! Oh, and stop being so selfish because Christmas is about Jesus"...we shouldn't be surprised when our kids stage a mutiny and ask to move in with Grandma. Young parents, this is so much easier to do right the first time rather than try to undo later. Give your kids the gift of a Christmas obsessed with Jesus - and no other - when they are little, and it will be their truth all their lives. Some practical points:

* When faced with Santa everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, we told our kids the story of the original St. Nicholas from the 3rd century, and his devotion to Jesus and the poor. We explained that Santa is a character based on his life, but one was real and one is pretend. We also told them some children believe Santa is real, and it's their parents' job to talk about that with their friends, not theirs. In other words, DON'T BE THAT KID WHO MAKES EVERYONE CRY IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS. You're welcome, teachers.

* For the most part, we are not watching TV this month. We're allowing movies and Netflix, but the less commercials our kids have to digest, the less confusing this month is for them. Um, ditto for all of us. When there are commercials that say, "Hey? You know how to avoid the terrible Disappointed Face when you give your loved one her gift? Buy her a Toyota!"...we have seriously derailed, folks.

* Take a big breath: I got rid of all my Santa paraphernalia this year. No more severed ceramic Santa heads up in here. Try not to flip out. (I am in the "undoing" category I mentioned above. So freaking hard.)

* This is big: I AM NOT JUDGING YOU. If you put carrots on your front lawn for the reindeer and stamp bootprints all over your living room from Santa's shoes, that is fully your prerogative. You don't need to hide your Santa wreath when I come over or defend your position to me or anyone. For us, Christmas has gone through four years of reconstruction, each year progressively more simplified. I know God is doing all sorts of different things with different families at different times; everybody be cool.


2.) While you're stewing over Santa, let's go ahead and tackle this one: spending. Whatintheworld? We recently watched a video from Christmas 2004 when our kids were six, four, and two. (Sidebar: Those of you with a 6-year-old, thinking he is so big? You will die one hundred thousand deaths in seven years when you look back at videos and realize he was just an infant baby. And then you will cry drippy, sad tears because you'll realize that when all those old women told you to enjoy early childhood because it will pass so quickly, and you wanted to kick them in the shins, they were right. It is over in a nanosecond and the next thing you know, your "six year old" is texting and getting ready for high school and smells like the inside of a trash can.)

I digress.

When we saw the mountains of presents in front of our P.R.E.S.C.H.O.O.L.E.R.S. and watched them rip through boxes so fast, they had no idea what they even received, I caught Brandon's eye across the room and mouthed, "We were freaks!" Not to mention all this bounty was brought into a home burgeoning with loot already, so we had to get rid of a bunch of toys just to shoehorn in the new stuff. Kindly note that the recipients of all this commerce couldn't even wipe their own butts yet.

Insane at best, sacrilegious at worst.

Four years ago, we started this gift-giving policy for each kid: Something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read. That's it. (This year we are adding something to give, and I'll talk about that in a minute.) Brandon and I don't buy for each other, and we draw names with our extended families, so each adult only buys one gift.

Friends and countrymen, we simply need to spend less on ourselves. There are plenty of practical reasons, like debt and financial strain and untold energy and stress. But even if we could afford to spend $500 on every important person in our lives, that sort of egregious consumerism is unbecoming for the Bride of Christ during a season that is supposed to be marked by the worship of Jesus.

We can find alternative rhythms to show each other our love. My mother-in-law is so very, very good at giving meaningful gifts based on making memories together. She takes my kids to plays and museums and day trips. She invites them to her house individually and spends precious time with them. My kids gobble this time with her down. Let's give the gifts of time and experiences and our creative talents and words this year. They will last long after the electric griddle has been forgotten.


3.) Let's MAKE DADGUM SURE the products we do buy don't come to us courtesy of slave labor. Like Ashley Judd said in Call+Response, "I don't want to wear someone else's despair. I don't want to eat someone else's tragedy." Our little church has joined the dog fight against human trafficking, and let me tell you something: When I refuse to carefully examine the vendors I buy from because it is inconvenient or overwhelming or I just really want that, I am turning the key that shackles the enslaved hands forced to produce my little goodies. I am as complicit as the abusers who exploit these laborers. And please don't tell me, "Not buying this one thing produced through a corrupt supply chain isn't going to make a difference." All that means is I don't care. If it was our children forced to work relentlessly in bondage, we would we hope and pray rich consumers across the world would battle that injustice by directing their consumer dollar with purpose, communicating to capitalistic opportunists "NO WE WILL NOT." We will call unethical business leaders to task with our words, our votes, and our money.

So many fantastic resources to help us become responsible consumers, calling vendors to reform and repentence using the language they truly understand...lack of profits:

* Download the Free2Work app, which allows you to scan barcodes and find out if that product is made responsibly or by slave labor.

* New to this conversation? Learn from our friends at Not For Sale. They are LEGIT.

* Need convincing? Download this Slavery Footprint and see where you land: "How many slaves work for you?" (Holy moly.)

* Know the top products made by slave labor, so you can be extra diligent on who you purchase them from. Careful...some of your faves are on the list (coffee, chocolate, cotton, sugar).

* Learn trusted vendors and stick with them, even if they cost more. We will not finance the slave industry because we are addicted to artificially low prices made possible by not paying the labor force.


4.) On the other hand, we can do so much good with our dollar! I think about the Acts 4 church, redistributing their resources "to anyone who had need." Such beauty. We can direct our Christmas dollar in two ways for great good:

Buying Products with a Conscience

These products range from beautiful artisan crafts made by former sex slaves or recipients of microloans; they include companies who use profits for international justice or employ vulnerable workers. Fabulously, these options are legion, and you don't have to look hard to find them. I'll include a few, then hopefully readers will add to the list of responsible vendors in the comment section:

www.cometogethertrading.com
www.redearthtradingco.com
www.furnacehillscoffee.com/index
www.preemptivelove.org
www.noondaycollection.com
www.bethejoy.com
www.goodnewsgoods.com
www.theopenarmsshop.com
www.commonthreadz.org
www.globalgirlfriend.com
www.3seams.com
www.ravenandlily.com
www.tradeasone.com
www.thehungersite.org
www.funkyfishdesigns.com

Giving

The second stream we can choose to float down this Christmas is out from underneath the consumer umbrella altogether (mixed metaphors, anyone?), and it is simply sharing our resources with those who need intervention to break the cycles of poverty and despair. This year, we are giving each of our children $100 to spend on the vulnerable. This is part of their Christmas present, because as you and I know, it just feels so awesome to be a part of Jesus' redemptive story. We will give them some options, and they can distribute their money however they want. Here are some trusted, responsible organizations to partner with, donating in increments as low as $10:

www.IJM.org/GiftsofFreedom
www.worldvision.org
www.mercycorps.org
www.miraclefoundation.org

5.) Finally (and all the readers breathed a sigh of relief), instead of just pulling old habits off the shelf and leaving a vacuum of void and guilt, let's replace American practices with - and I mean this in the most sincerest sense - Christian practices. Let's fill our homes with Jesus and find ways to worship Him with our little families every day this month. Let's join the Advent Conspiracy, daring to believe that Christmas can still change the world. May beautiful words fill our houses; lyrics like Come and behold him, born the the King of angels. As much as possible, let's mute the competing chatter trying so hard to invade our spaces; turning it down, turning it off. Celebrate Advent with your kids with diligence and anticipation. We ordered a fun version of the Advent Calendar, and each night the kids open a new envelope full of Scriptures and family activities. (Tonight we are reading about Jesus, the Light of the World, talking about what being a light in the darkness means, then playing flashlight tag. Yes, I'm sure someone will get hurt.)

The placement of our envelope string does not annoy Brandon at all.


Believers, let's do beautiful things together this month like serve and share and spend time with one another. Let's invite the loneliest people we know into our homes and show them Jesus. How about we make lovely food together, then share it. Parents, talk about Jesus' impending birthday like it is the most precious, thrilling, miraculous moment you have ever heard of in your life. Can we be brave enough to say "enough" to any further ruination of Jesus' day? Can we risk difficult conversations with grandparents and friends and our own children, understanding that Jesus called it the narrow way for a reason, and he wasn't kidding when he said few would find it? Let's listen to divergent thinkers and spiritual leaders who are courageously leading us in the ways of Jesus this December, helping us resist consumerism and selfishness and giving voice to our radical thoughts and inner tension.

Despite what your mother might say when you tell her you're scaling back this year, I am not trying to ruin your Christmas. On the contrary. I'm dying to rediscover what is simple and magnificent about the Savior of the World coming to earth, putting on flesh and saving my life. I so want my kids to marvel that Jesus came, just like God said he would, and he split history in two, forever transforming the concepts of hope and peace and salvation. And I just feel like when I create a season revolving around wish lists, frenzy, and alternate characters of honor, my kids will never understand any of this.

And neither will I.

Together, we have the opportunity to show a watching world something truly hopeful and sincerely beautiful this Christmas. We can live alternative rhythms in front of people, showing them something better than stress and spending and tension and exhaustion. We can raise children who understand exactly why the songwriter wrote: Oh come let us adore Him. We can partner with Jesus and bring good news to the nations yet again, fighting injustices and carrying hope to the ends of the earth through something as simple as sharing our money. Most importantly, we can render to Jesus the reverence he is owed, pushing all substitutions to the side and making our homes holy ground. This is why (from my favorite singular lyric in any hymn ever):

Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Til He appeared and the soul felt it's worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn...

The weary world rejoices indeed. Thank you, Jesus, Lord at thy birth. Joy to the world.



Readers, how do you give Christmas to Jesus? What alternate rhythms have you established? What vendors do you love to support? And if you find yourself disagreeing, I welcome your comments as well. This is a worthy conversation and I'm just glad we're talking about it.

Sometimes being ever-so-slightly in the public eye is rough. With a mouth and discernment problem like mine, you can imagine. I basically offer my life on the altar of criticism daily, then douse the sacrifice with plenty of fuel to make disparagement a lay-up.

For instance, Brandon and I attended a Halloween party last weekend with the theme “Heroes and Super villains.” Our friends came in such costumes as Captain America and the Joker and Kim Possible. They were all very polished and adorable. We came as washed-up, possibly strung out Superman and Supergirl complete with ripped fishnets, smeared makeup, and pistol tattoo drawn with Sharpie. We may or may not have had unlit cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths.

These choices are often met with disapproval from the watching masses, as you might well guess. I know you wish I would only dress up as Little Bo Peep or Mary Mother of Jesus, but Brandon and I are very, very silly and immature, and I’ve been trying to tell you people this for some time.

But usually I am grateful for the connection to the greater world, if only through social media and the miracle of emails (plus embarrassing transparency). For example, just a few days ago, I received this email:

Our good friends just returned from Ethiopia last night with their two little boys. Ok, they've had their "airport" moment and we were right there with them. What are some things we can do now to support them in the "real life" journey without overstepping our boundaries? Thank you so much for your transparency and honesty. Everyone can benefit when you share from your heart.

I was so moved by this email. Having benefitted from a community that practically smothered us with support throughout our adoption journey, I am so grateful for all the other good friends out there, loving their people and asking how to help. Since reading this email, I’ve been marinating on her question, and I’ve decided to write this Field Guide to Supporting Adoptive Families. (And it will be brief because I will try to remember that this is a blog and not a manuscript and the rules of blogging include succinctness, so that is exactly how I’ll proceed today, except for the exact opposite of all that.)

Let’s break this down into two categories:

Supporting Families Before the Airport

Your friends are adopting. They’re in the middle of dossiers and home studies, and most of them are somewhere in the middle of Waiting Purgatory. Please let me explain something about WP: It sucks in every way. Oh sure, we try to make it sound better than it feels by using phrases like “We’re trusting in God’s plan” and “God is refining me” and “Sovereignty trumps my feelings” and crazy bidness like that. But we are crying and aching and getting angry and going bonkers when you’re not watching. It’s hard. It hurts. It feels like an eternity even though you can see that it is not. It is harder for us to see that, because many of us have pictures on our refrigerators of these beautiful darlings stuck in an orphanage somewhere while we’re bogged down in bureaucracy and delays.

How can you help? By not saying or doing these things:

1. “God’s timing is perfect!” (Could also insert: “This is all God’s plan!” “God is in charge!”) As exactly true as this may be, when you say it to a waiting parent, we want to scratch your eyebrows off and make you eat them with a spoon. Any trite answer that minimizes the struggle is as welcomed as a sack of dirty diapers. You are voicing something we probably already believe while not acknowledging that we are hurting and that somewhere a child is going to bed without a mother again. Please never say this again. Thank you.

2. “Are you going to have your own kids?” (Also in this category: “You’ll probably get pregnant the minute your adoption clears!” “Since this is so hard, why don’t you just try to have your own kids?” “Well, at least you have your own kids.”) The subtle message here is: You can always have legitimate biological kids if this thing tanks. It places adoption in the Back-up Plan Category, where it does not belong for us. When we flew to Ethiopia with our first travel group from our agency, out of 8 couples, we were the only parents with biological kids. The other 7 couples chose adoption first. Several of them were on birth control. Adoption counts as real parenting, and if you believe stuff Jesus said, it might even be closer to the heart of God than regular old procreation. (Not to mention the couples that grieved through infertility already. So when you say, “Are you going to have your own kids?” to a woman who tried for eight years, then don’t be surprised if she pulls your beating heart out like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.)

3. For those of you in Christian community, it is extremely frustrating to hear: “Don’t give up on God!” or “Don’t lose faith!” It implies that we are one nanosecond away from tossing our entire belief system in the compost pile because we are acting sad or discouraged. It’s condescending and misses the crux of our emotions. I can assure you, at no point in our story did we think about kicking Jesus to the curb, but we still get to cry tears and feel our feelings, folks. Jesus did. And I’m pretty sure he went to heaven when he died.

4. We’re happy to field your questions about becoming a transracial family or adopting a child of another race, but please don’t use this moment to trot out your bigotry. (Cluelessness is a different thing, and we try to shrug that off. Like when someone asked about our Ethiopian kids, “Will they be black?” Aw, sweet little dum-dum.) The most hurtful thing we heard during our wait was from a black pastor who said, “Whatever you do, don’t change their last name to Hatmaker, because they are NOT Hatmakers. They’ll never be Hatmakers. They are African.” What the??? I wonder if he’d launch the same grenade if we adopted white kids from Russia? If you’d like to know what we’re learning about raising children of another race or ask respectful, legitimate questions, by all means, do so. We care about this and take it seriously, and we realize we will traverse racial landmines with our family. You don’t need to point out that we are adopting black kids and we are, in fact, white. We’ve actually already thought of that.

5. Saying nothing is the opposite bad. I realize with blogs like this one, you can get skittish on how to talk to a crazed adopting Mama without getting under her paper-thin skin or inadvertently offending her. I get it. (We try hard not to act so hypersensitive. Just imagine that we are paper-pregnant with similar hormones surging through our bodies making us cry at Subaru commercials just like the 7-month preggo sitting next to us. And look at all this weight we’ve gained. See?) But acting like we’re not adopting or struggling or waiting or hoping or grieving is not helpful either. If I was pregnant with a baby in my belly, and no one ever asked how I was feeling or how much longer or is his nursery ready or can we plan a shower, I would have to audition new friend candidates immediately.

Here’s what we would love to hear Before the Airport:

1. Just kind, normal words of encouragement. Not the kind that assume we are one breath away from atheism. Not the kind that attempt to minimize the difficulties and tidy it all up with catchphrases. We don’t actually need for you to fix our wait. We just want you to be our friend and acknowledge that the process is hard and you care about us while we’re hurting. That is GOLD. I was once having lunch with my friend Lynde when AWAA called with more bad news about Ben’s case, and I laid my head down on the table in the middle of Galaxy Café and bawled. Having no idea what to do with such a hot mess, she just cried with me. Thank you for being perfect that day, Lynde.

2. Your questions are welcomed! We don’t mind telling you about the court system in Ethiopia or the in-country requirements in Nicaragua or the rules of the foster system. We’re glad to talk about adoption, and we’re thankful you care. I assure you we didn’t enter adoption lightly, so sharing details of this HUGE PIECE OF OUR LIVES is cathartic. Plus, we want you to know more because we’re all secretly hoping you’ll adopt later. (This is not true.) (Yes it is.)

3. When you say you’re praying for us and our waiting children, and you actually really are, not only does that soothe our troubled souls, but according to Scripture, it activates the heavens. So pray on, dear friends. Pray on. That is always the right thing to say. And please actually do it. We need people to stand in the gap for us when we are too tired and discouraged to keep praying the same words another day.

4. If you can, please become telepathic to determine which days we want to talk about adoption and which days we’d rather you just show up on our doorstep with fresh figs from the Farmer’s Market (thanks, Katie) or kidnap us away in the middle of the day to go see Bridesmaids. Sometimes we need you to make us laugh and remember what it feels like to be carefree for a few hours. If you’re not sure which day we’re having, just pre-buy movie tickets and show up with the figs, and when we answer the door, hold them all up and ask, “Would you like to talk for an hour uninterrupted about waiting for a court date?” We’ll respond to whichever one fits.

Supporting Families After the Airport

You went to the airport. The baby came down the escalator to cheers and balloons. The long adoption journey is over and your friends are home with their new baby / toddler / twins / siblings / teenager. Everyone is happy. Maybe Fox News even came out and filmed the big moment and “your friend” babbled like an idiot and didn’t say one constructive word about adoption and also she looked really sweaty during her interview. (Really? That happened to me too. Weird.)

How can you help? By not saying or doing these things:

1. I mean this nicely, but don’t come over for awhile. Most of us are going to hole up in our homes with our little tribe and attempt to create a stable routine without a lot of moving parts. This is not because we hate you; it’s because we are trying to establish the concept of “home” with our newbies, and lots of strangers coming and going makes them super nervous and unsure, especially strangers who are talking crazy language to them and trying to touch their hair.

2. Please do not touch, hug, kiss, or use physical affection with our kids for a few months. We absolutely know your intentions are good, but attachment is super tricky with abandoned kids, and they have had many caregivers, so when multiple adults (including extended family) continue to touch and hold them in their new environment, they become confused about who to bond with. This actually delays healthy attachment egregiously. It also teaches them that any adult or stranger can touch them without their permission, and believe me, many adoptive families are working HARD to undo the damage already done by this position. Thank you so much for respecting these physical boundaries.

3. For the next few months, do not assume the transition is easy. For 95% of us, it so is not. And this isn’t because our family is dysfunctional or our kids are lemons, but because this phase is so very hard on everyone. I can’t tell you how difficult it was to constantly hear: “You must be so happy!” and “Is life just so awesome now that they’re here??” and “Your family seems just perfect now!” I wanted that to be true so deeply, but I had no idea how to tell you that our home was actually a Trauma Center. (I did this in a passive aggressive way by writing this blog, which was more like “An Open Letter to Everyone Who Knows Us and Keeps Asking Us How Happy We Are.”) Starting with the right posture with your friends – this is hard right now – will totally help you become a safe friend to confide in / break down in front of / draw strength from.

4. Do not act shocked if we tell you how hard the early stages are. Do not assume adoption was a mistake. Do not worry we have ruined our lives. Do not talk behind our backs about how terribly we’re doing and how you’re worried that we are suicidal. Do not ask thinly veiled questions implying that we are obviously doing something very, very wrong. Do not say things like, “I was so afraid it was going to be like this” or “Our other friends didn’t seem to have these issues at all.” Just let us struggle. Be our friends in the mess of it. We’ll get better.

5. If we’ve adopted older kids, please do not ask them if they “love America so much” or are “so happy to live in Texas.” It’s this simple: adoption is born from horrible loss. In an ideal world, there would be no adoption, because our children would be with their birth families, the way God intended. I’ll not win any points here, but I bristle when people say, “Our adopted child was chosen for us by God before the beginning of time.” No he wasn’t. He was destined for his birth family. God did not create these kids to belong to us. He didn’t decide that they should be born into poverty or disease or abandonment or abuse and despair aaaaaaaall so they could finally make it into our homes, where God intended them to be. No. We are a very distant Plan B. Children are meant for their birth families, same as my biological kids were meant for mine. Adoption is one possible answer to a very real tragedy… after it has already happened, not before as the impetus for abandonment. There is genuine grief and sorrow when your biological family is disrupted by death and poverty, and our kids have endured all this and more. So when you ask my 8-year-old if he is thrilled to be in Texas, please understand that he is not. He misses his country, his language, his food, his family. Our kids came to us in the throes of grief, as well they should. Please don’t make them smile and lie to you about how happy they are to be here.

6. Please do not disappear. If I thought the waiting stage was hard, it does not even hold the barest candle to what comes after the airport. Not. The. Barest. Candle. Never have I felt so isolated and petrified. Never have I been so overwhelmed and exhausted. We need you after the airport way more than we ever needed you before. I know you’re scared of us, what with our dirty hair and wild eyes and mystery children we’re keeping behind closed doors so they don’t freak out more than they already have, but please find ways to stick around. Call. Email. Check in. Post on our Facebook walls. Send us funny cards. Keep this behavior up for longer than six days.

Here’s what we would love to hear or experience After the Airport:

1. Cook for your friends. Put together a meal calendar and recruit every person who even remotely cares about them. We didn’t cook dinners for one solid month, and folks, that may have single handedly saved my sanity. There simply are not words to describe how exhausting and overwhelming those first few weeks are, not to mention the lovely jetlag everyone came home with. And if your friends adopted domestically right up the street, this is all still true, minus the jetlag.

2. If we have them, offer to take our biological kids for an adventure or sleepover. Please believe me: their lives just got WHACKED OUT, and they need a break, but their parents can’t give them one because they are 1.) cleaning up pee and poop all day, 2.) holding screaming children, 3.) spending all their time at doctors’ offices, and 4.) falling asleep in their clothes at 8:15pm. Plus, they are in lockdown mode with the recently adopted, trying to shield them from the trauma that is Walmart.

3. Thank you for getting excited with us over our little victories. I realize it sounds like a very small deal when we tell you our kindergartener is now staying in the same room as the dog, but if you could’ve seen the epic level of freakoutedness this dog caused her for three weeks, you would understand that this is really something. When you encourage us over our incremental progress, it helps. You remind us that we ARE moving forward and these little moments are worth celebrating. If we come to you spazzing out, please remind us where we were a month ago. Force us to acknowledge their gains. Be a cheerleader for the healing process.

4. Come over one night after our kids are asleep and sit with us on our porch. Let me tell you: we are all lonely in those early weeks. We are home, home, home, home, home. Good-bye, date nights. Good-bye, GNO’s. Good-bye, spontaneous anything. Good-bye, church. Good-bye, big public outings. Good-bye, community group. Good-bye, nightlife. So please bring some community to our doorstep. Bring friendship back into our lives. Bring adult conversation and laughter. And bring an expensive bottle of wine.

5. If the shoe fits, tell adopting families how their story is affecting yours. If God has moved in you over the course of our adoption, whether before the airport or after, if you’ve made a change or a decision, if somewhere deep inside a fire was lit, tell us, because it is spiritual water on dry souls. There is nothing more encouraging than finding out God is using our families for greater kingdom work, beautiful things we would never know or see. We gather the holy moments in our hands every day, praying for eyes to see God’s presence, his purposes realized in our story. When you put more holy moments in our hands to meditate on, we are drawn deeper into the Jesus who led us here.

Here’s one last thing: As you watch us struggle and celebrate and cry and flail, we also want you to know that adoption is beautiful, and a thousand times we’ve looked at each other and said, “What if we would’ve said no?” God invited us into something monumental and lovely, and we would’ve missed endless moments of glory had we walked away. We need you during these difficult months of waiting and transitioning, but we also hope you see that we serve a faithful God who heals and actually sets the lonely in families, just like He said He would. And even through the tears and tantrums (ours), we look at our children and marvel that God counted us worthy to raise them. We are humbled. We’ve been gifted with a very holy task, and when you help us rise to the occasion, you have an inheritance in their story; your name will be counted in their legacy.

Because that day you brought us pulled pork tacos was the exact day I needed to skip dinner prep and hold my son on the couch for an hour, talking about Africa and beginning to bind up his emotional wounds. When you kidnapped me for two hours and took me to breakfast, I was at the very, very, absolute end that morning, but I came home renewed, able to greet my children after school with fresh love and patience. When you loved on my big kids and offered them sanctuary for a night, you kept the family rhythm in sync at the end of a hard week.

Thank you for being the village. You are so important.

Adoptive friends, what can you add? What has been helpful or hurtful? How has your community helped you raise your children? What do friends and family need to hear?

Some of you are lucky enough to know my dad. If you fit that category, you just started smiling/laughing/shaking your head. Larry is legendary; to know him is to love him. And to marvel at his ability to wield inappropriateness and godliness at the same time. You kiss your wife with that mouth? Yes, yes he does.

My dad thought me and my siblings were the most spectacular children ever born to humans. From the time we took our first breath, we were encouraged within an inch of our lives. In the throes of teen angst but with no genuine parental grievances to moan about, we complained about Dad's long, never-ending encouragement tirades. ("Gah! It's so annoying how Dad is always affirming us and validating our passions and loving us. This house sucks!")

According to him, we were smart, almost embarrassingly gifted, our athletic prowess was Division 1 material obviously, and our collective skill sets should've been harnessed for world domination. Also? We were first-rate spellers. We could and should be varsity starters, class presidents, Most Likely to Succeed candidates, Homecoming Queens and Kings, National Merit Scholars, and award-winning break-dancers.

This was all obvious to Dad.

Also clear was this: Anyone who failed to recognize our awesomeness - teachers, Drew's 6th grade baseball coach, my 12th grade Media Arts instructor, the registrar at OBU, head hunters, colleagues, a smattering of ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, neighbors, youth pastors, arresting officers, principals - were not only imbeciles, but they were unfit for their careers and destined for personal ruin. They were, in fact, endangering civilized society. Can fresh water pertaining to your children and salt water regarding their enemies flow from the same mouth? Yes, yes it can.

What I'm trying to tell you is that I've been overvalued my entire life. My siblings and I grew up believing we were so incredibly important and special, that it wasn't until somewhere in our 20's that we realized we were just sort of medium. (Dad still refuses to swallow this pill and offers to contact my critics to "tell them a thing or two about what idiots they are." "Dad, I'm 37 years old." "Well, that doesn't make that guy any less of a fool. Fools need to be told they are fools.")

Say what you will about his tactics, but we grew up with a dad who had our backs, people. There was never any question where his loyalties rested. We were Club King, and he was our bouncer. Oppose us at your own risk; you will certainly pull back a nub.

Because of this, my sisters and brother and I were launched into this world loved. We grew up under the staggering weight of my parents' affirmation, and somewhere along the way, it accidentally made us secure. We never had to create enabling, pleasing personas because Dad battled injustices and taught us self-respect. We had no concept of the term passive aggressive. We didn't fall to (complete) shreds over every biting remark, because who cares what you think of me? Dad thinks I'm awesome, and he would never lie.

Along with a tangible love for Jesus, my parents gave us the gift of security - secure that we were loved and valued and precious and worthy of respect - and let me tell you, I'm not sure they could've given us anything more important.

And let me be clear: We didn't have cable, we didn't take fancy vacations, we didn't shop at the Limited. I had no idea kids my age went to Europe or had time shares. I often drove my mom's truly horrible station wagon (The Gray Ghost) to school because our family collection of Rabbits and Chevettes were all broken down. Our phone attached to the wall with a cord. We didn't consort with the famous or notorious or attend expensive concerts.

Folks, I got home perms.

Do you know how often any of that mattered? Never. I didn't even know we didn't have money until I was an adult. What I did know is that my parents loved us; with words, with actions, with their presence. Dad covered us with encouragement in a near constant stream of words, then he lavished it after every failure or success. He spent copious amounts of time talking to us about our sports, our boyfriends/girlfriends, our clubs, our projects. Dad tried very hard to care about our stuff; before every single school dance, he told us we looked beautiful for "the prom."

It occurs to me now more than ever, as we have two children in our family now who've been wounded so deeply by words, that I have all the tools I need to become a healing parent for them. I learned the most important tricks of the trade not at an adoption conference, not between the pages of a book, but at 315 Basswood in Haysville, Kansas, growing up as Larry King's daughter.

I don't have to give my kids the motorized cars they've been begging for since arriving in America. (Thanks, All My Friends Who Own Them.) Because it's not the fancy cars that will heal. Nor must I ensure their playroom is stocked with hundreds of toys they'll play with for three days then forget because their choices are so vast. It's not the toys that will mend what is broken.

I don't have to be perfect or give them some perfectly controlled life. I don't have to wield adoptive phraseology with precision every time. I don't have to create the ideal environment where struggling is minimized and sanitized. I don't have to make up for a lifetime of their losses with a new world of unchecked materialism. I might not even need to make perfect injera.

My task is to tell my children they are beautiful and wanted, that God thought long and hard about how to create them exactly right, and the heavens burst into applause when they were born. I'll tell them that Jesus sometimes sent grown-ups away but always called the children right into his lap. I'll make sure they know being abandoned was not their fault; they are innocents in their trauma. They are good and precious and special and important. By gosh, they are first-rate spellers.

Like my dad, my job is to study Remy's artwork and act like Picasso himself would shrink in insecurity to compare his little silly drawings to hers. When Ben accomplishes the task of breathing deeply and controlling his anger, I will lavish praise on him as if he learned to split atoms. When my big kids show mercy as their moments are once again hijacked by the heavy needs of their new siblings, I will kiss their cheeks and hold them tightly and marvel at how proud I am to see so much Jesus in them.

I read this post by Christine Caine last week, and it really stuck with me.

It is the words we use that will raise our children out of the mire, healing words of love and belonging and affirmation. Similar words that God took great care to speak over us through Scripture, reminding us that even in our pain and sin, we are loved, adopted, important, valuable. It is not coming unglued over spilled drinks and lost shoes and daily mistakes, choosing not to further injure their little spirits over non-essentials.

This will never be encapsulated in one moment or even one year. It isn't wielding an adoption/parenting dialect better than the next frazzled Mama. It's thousands of ordinary sentences filled with millions of loving words spoken to our children while they live under our roofs. The collective impact of years of encouragement will imprint our children with ideas that will become so intrinsic, they will never question their truth:

You are loved.
We believe in you so much.
We are for you, always.
You belong with us.
You are valuable and important.
You are forever safe with us.

Will we raise little narcissists who think the world revolves around them and owes them a happy life? Listen, I'm not talking about neglecting discipline and allowing our cherubs to turn into miniature terrorists. Nor should we cushion every blow or clean up all their mistakes so they won't feeeeeeeeel bad. Believe me, we keep it real in the Hatmaker house. You open up a sassy mouth and you're gonna pay the piper. (When Gavin told me they were the only kids on earth who didn't get an allowance, I told him: "Listen, kid, I'm not going to pay you to live in my house. You want money? Get a job.")

But trust me, this world stands ready to criticize our children, mock their dreams, underestimate their potential, and pulverize their spirits. They have an enemy and he wants them destroyed. They will encounter antagonists and haters, and they'll be wounded by wounded people. They will get their fair share of humiliation. Our children will be betrayed and disappointed as sure as I'm sitting here. We need not worry about keeping our kids humble by withholding verbal praise or being stingy with affirmation and quick with criticism.

The world will do that for us.

Our job is to make sure our children know that no matter how messy life gets, regardless of how epically they fail, they will always find an open door at home. That family is forever, and our well of love for them will never run dry. And if along the way we accidentally make them believe they are the most gifted, hilarious, clever, wickedly talented children on the planet, well, perhaps it will just become fodder for their blogs one day, and they'll have to email us special links with instructions on how to open it because, BLAST IT, we can't figure out this newfangled technology these days on the internets and our laptops have scuff marks and dents where we banged them on the desk in frustration (hi, Dad).

The other day, I turned the corner and saw Remy straddling the banister, preparing for a leisurely slide down the stairs. (Related: This is why our banister has been pulled out of the sheetrock twice. We can't have anything nice. Our kids can find a way to destroy solid cement floors.)

Me: Remy, we don't do that. It's not safe.
Caleb: Yes we do.

Ok listen, some things have been happening around here that I feel the need to unload. Do we slide down banisters? Perhaps. And maybe my sons and their friends sometimes line the stairs with sleeping bags and surf down on boogie boards where they crash land on the pile of pillows arranged at the bottom. It's certainly not with my approval.

I realize this video causes you alarm if your babies are all six and under or if you only have one precious cherub, but trust me, a few years and few kids later? You won't be nearly the Safety Susan you are now. You'll be all, "Oh well, it's just 22 miles away. Yall double buckle..." when you're out of seats in your car because all your kids' friends have piled in and you have to get to Schlitterbahn or die trying.

You will sell the "elbow and knee pads" in your garage sale to a mom with a preschooler.

Despite your best common sense, you will send your kid to school with a Lunchable.

You will leave the trampoline up long after the net has been torn down by your savage kids.

You will lighten up. And miraculously, your kids will still live despite the absence of your hypervigilance. (My mom didn't know where I was for approximately one-fourth of my elementary years. She saw me at dinner after I wandered home from my adventures. "Where did all those scrapes come from, Jen?" "I fell off some scaffolding at that abandoned construction site where me and Amy were hunting for scorpions." "Well, you seem fine. Set the table.")

Clearly, I'm not the hovering Mama I once was. As this picture demonstrates:

But something has happened to me since the arrival of our newest Hatmakers from Ethiopia. I've taken a couple of steps backward...past caution, right through watchful, beyond fastidious, and all the way to fantasy, apparently. Conversation between me and Brandon:

J: I feel so frustrated.
B: Why?
J: We have a fresh slate with Ben and Remy. We haven't ruined them yet. This is the time to introduce our systems and chore charts and stuff. We need a marble jar for good behavior. I read about that somewhere. I really want to show them how we run a smooth, efficient home with teamwork and diligence.
B: (after five seconds of silence) What family are you talking about?
J: The Fake Family I invented in my head.
B: Uh-huh. And how's that working out for you?
J: It's awesome. I love Fake Family. Their kids wash their hands after using the bathroom every single time.
B: Because they have such organized, responsible parents?
J: Yes. And Gavin is the starting quarterback on the high school varsity team. As an eighth grader. He's that good. Mack Brown is interested; he started following me on Twitter. And in Fake Family, I'm a size four because I make better choices.
B: Wow. Fake Jen sounds awesome.
J: Really? Did I mention Fake Brandon always closes the cabinet doors after he opens them and he never complains when I ask him to "fix my iTunes" again? He is spectacular.

I had these ideas about bringing the kids home to a perfectly run household with impressive structures and systems; our food was all organic obviously, and our kids miraculously stopped fighting. In fact, after Ben and Remy arrived, there would never be another argument in our home. We would be the ideal prototype for responsible child-rearing. Our kids would track with math and science scores reported from Japan. They would certainly not become addicted to Movies on Demand or Angry Birds, because they could only earn a maximum of fifteen minutes of screen time a week after completing their required chores and "bonus exercise points" through the online job chart we complete by 6:30pm each night, after enjoying the traditional Ethiopian meal I made from scratch but before their systematic language instruction (their bedtime ritual), which would really just reinforce the conversational practice they'd enjoy with our Amharic tutor three days a week, refreshing their native tongue and instructing the rest of us as well. We'd all be pretty fluent by Halloween. (It's just because we love them so much. Don't make a big deal out of it.)

Fake Family is impressive. Let me tell you. They would sail through their post-adoption social worker visits. People would talk. You couldn't ignore their awesomeness for long. They would be invited on panels. Dr. Karyn Purvis would comment on their blogs.

But my actual family is just messing all this up, including the person typing this blog. As it turned out, Ben and Remy didn't join a perfect family; they joined a real family. Oh sure, we chased the dream of raising model children when our bio kids were tiny, but it didn't take long to release that delusion. Mainly because we weren't raising characters in books, but human children. We also accidentally discovered that we were human parents and capable of *occasional* missteps.

Our life is no prototype. If you wanted to find holes in our parenting resume, it would take you three seconds. Any critic or unsympathizer could make a quick list of our faults, hypocrisies, blind spots, and double standards (and then send them to me in a direct message...awesome). It would be so easy. We live a messy life in a messy world. There are a zillion ways we could be better. I have no idea if my kids will make the Top 10% of their graduating classes or 'Just Say No'. Will they choose organic? I feel the chances are slim; it seems certain their college pantries will be rife with Pop Tarts. If they fail half as epically as Brandon and I did as adolescents, we are in for some serious retribution.

I'm not sure when I got the idea that adoption required perfection or that there was some exacting formula that prevents grief and struggle. Maybe it was through the year and a half of daily discussions with my adoption community which: 1.) prepared me more than any other resource, 2.) encouraged, prayed, cheered, and commiserated with aplomb, and 3.) made me a teeny bit paranoid. You know when you over-talk about something, and it takes on this huge life of its own and increases your idling levels and fills your head with more ideas than you can execute, especially considering most of the advice is "before the airport" and super skewed toward other people's preferences, and it's kind of like reading those 80-pound bridal magazines that tell you no wedding is complete without pashmina shawls for the bridesmaids and a guided tour of a local museum for guests arriving early? No? Me neither.

Of course, manufactured entirely in my own brain was the notion that their lives have been so unfair and their circumstances so heart-breaking, that surely I owed it to Ben and Remy to bring them into a nearly perfect environment. I would do this so well.

As it turns out, I'm still susceptible to fatigue and discouragement. My other kids didn't kick that selfish gene. I still don't have a working laundry schedule that I stick to for more than two weeks. I fed my daughter Chick-Fil-A on her fourth day in America. My lentils don't taste right. Ben knows how to work the Apple TV by himself. All seven of us have cried in the last two months. The kids' closets are galloping toward entropy.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've had lice.

So for those of you trying to dodge the idea of adoption because your marriage is not perfect and you don't have your crap entirely together, please let me dispel the notion of "necessary impeccability." I'm learning this: Orphaned kids don't need a perfect family...they just need a loving one. You needn't be fit for display and ready for the adoption speakers' circuit.

Can you enter into the grief of a child and stay there until God heals? Do you have room on your lap for another daughter who would delight in the same "Carl Books" you read the rest of your kids? Could you direct your diligence toward becoming a healing parent, even if that just means listening and affirming and acknowledging and holding a child through the storm? Can you be miraculously, fantastically present for a child that is positive you too will disappear one day? Do you have the gumption to be oh-so-very consistent with boundaries and discipline, understanding that requiring their respect supplies them with the very security they crave in a parent who is actually in charge, freeing them up to be a kid instead of a survivor?

Then Kelly Ripa or not ("Be even more amazing!"), you can throw your hat in this ring.

I suspect one day our kids will not recall the laundry piled on our couches or every little time we blew it, but I hope they carry into adulthood the security that they were wanted, they were adored, they were cherished, and they were loved. So very loved. Parents, we might not get it all right even seven out of ten times, but failure is not a deal breaker inside the safety of a family. I pray one day we launch our kids into this world whole and healed, redeemed by the touch of their Savior and transformed simply because we loved and we stayed...imperfectly and beautifully.

Admittedly, I miss Fake Family. I loved them so much. On paper. I told Brandon:

J: I'm still holding out hope for Fake Family. I think I might be able to pull it off.
B: You put body lotion in our daughter's hair.
J: Alright. Never mind. Pass the Pringles.

I'm going to tell you something; a little confession, if you will. Some of you will pull your hair out and smear your faces with ashes and put all my books on eBay and quit believing in God, but I'm willing to take that risk:

I'm really, really glad all my kids are back in school.

There. I said it. The three children that I birthed and nursed and raised from scratch, and the two children we begged and cried and screeched for and fetched from Africa...all five of these kids are in school. And I am happy, so happy, happy, happy, happy, hip-hip-hooray Mary Poppins happy.

For my friends and readers who homeschool, I tip my hat and say to you, "Well done, good and faithful servants." And believe me, I have a couple of besties who paddle in that stream, and paddle it well. For some kids in some cities in some families in some districts, this is the very right thing. The end. Why people feel the need to make a fuss about how other parents decide to educate their children is beyond me. Let's live and let live, yall. For the love of Pete.

But I cannot educate my own children, people, unless I am OK with us all becoming homicidal.

Plus, we're in a nice little Bermuda triangle where our kids feed into fabulous schools with vested teachers that make me want to weep with gratitude. The language resources for my Amharic speakers is over the top, and I have a free pass to attend school each and every day, which I have exercised with zero restraint.

But this is not a post about homeschooling or public schooling. The reason I am happy my kids are in school is not because I lack the organization to educate five kids (which I do), it's not because I've chosen a career with a moderate workload (which I have), and it's not because I'm a little sloppy on details and my kids would likely graduate with a sixth-grade education (which they would).

It's because parenting right now is EXHAUSTING and the mental break is keeping me afloat.

On July 22nd we came down the escalator at the Austin airport with Remy. On August 21st we came down the same escalator with Ben. These were two of the happiest days of my life.

After an arduous adoption journey, our kids were safe in our arms, tucked into their bunk beds their dad built with his own two hands, surrounded by the dearest, most sincere community we have ever known. God delivered them from poverty and abandonment back into a family, no longer alone in this big world; now wanted and loved and welcomed with great fervor.

The end.

Not.

Remy gave us about 12 hours of honeymooning until her terror burst onto the scene. Sometimes her fear is so palpable, it literally takes my breath away. New places: terror. New faces: total insecurity. Transitions: help us, Jesus. She has asked us every single day since July 22nd if she is going back to Ethiopia. Every. Single. Day. When I discovered cashews to be a winning legume for her impossible palate, I told her:

"Yay! Good job! Cashews are good for you and will help you grow big and strong!"
"Big? Ah-Rrrremy? Big? Cashews?"
"Yes!"
She pushes them away and starts crying.
Once again, I am bewildered and befuddled.
"No! No Ah-Rrremy grow big! Me big, then go back to Ethiopia! No! Dis is no!"

When a child fears that cashews will once again leave her abandoned on this earth because she will grow out of the age we might still want to parent her, you are dealing with heartbreaking fragility.

Her fear comes out as 1.) defiance, 2.) terror, and 3.) catatonic disassociation, in that order. We've been spit on, kicked, disobeyed, refused, clung to, begged for, adored, ignored, and rejected. Triggers are unpredictable. Yesterday, we entered an hour-long Armageddon because she wouldn't put her bike up. This turned into defiance and disrespect, deal breakers as we establish safe boundaries. When at long last her angry, dark face relented, and she finally uttered in the smallest voice: "I'm sorry, Mommy. I'm sorry, Daddy," the damn broke and she cried for thirty minutes, telling us over and over that we don't love her and she is going back to Africa.

Meanwhile, Ben sidled up quietly next to me as Brandon held Remy's flailing legs, and asked in a whisper: "Mom? Forever?"

Is this family forever, even with this hysterical girl? Are you forever, even though she is draining the lifeblood out of you and Dad? Am I forever, once my junk starts coming out that I'm holding in? Are you forever for her? For me? Should I be worried that you'll only put up with this level of chaos for so long?

God love them.

We are parenting damaged, traumatized children; don't let the pictures fool you. We're in the weeds. Every minute is on; there is no off. We've arrived late, cancelled altogether, hunkered down in therapy mode, missed appointments, failed to answer hundreds of emails in a timely manner, left voicemails unlistened to, texts unread, we've restructured, regrouped, replanned, reorganized, we've punted and called audibles, we've left the bigs on their own, hoping they are functioning well on auto-pilot after a lifetime of healthy stability, and sometimes, we put "Tangled" on for the eleventh time and cry in the bathroom.

We are exhausted beyond measure.

I know what you're thinking: You asked for this. Yes we did. And we'd ask for it again, with full disclosure and foreknowledge. We would. We would say yes to adoption, to Ben, to Remy. We would do it all over again. We might do it all over again in the future.

That does not mean we are not exhausted.

I know what else you might be thinking: Are you trying to scare people away from adoption? Because this is pretty good propaganda for turning a blind eye to this mess. No I'm not. While adoption is clearly not the answer for the 170 million orphans on earth, it is one answer, and I'll go to the grave begging more people to open their homes and minds and hearts to abandoned children who are praying for a Mom and Dad and a God who might still see them.

But Brandon and I decided some time ago to go at this honestly, with truthful words and actual experiences that might encourage the weary heart or battle some of the fluffy, damaging semi-truths about adopting. Because let me tell you something: If you are intrigued by the idea of adoption, with the crescendoing storyine and happy airport pictures and the sigh-inducing family portrait with the different skin colors and the feely-feel good parts of the narrative, please find another way to see God's kingdom come.

You cannot just be into adoption to adopt; you have to be into parenting.

And it is hard, hard, intentional, laborious work. Children who have been abused, abandoned, neglected, given away, given up, and left alone are shaken so deeply, so intrinsically, they absolutely require parents who are willing to wholly invest in their healing; through the screaming, the fits, the anger, the shame, the entitlement, the bed-wetting, the spitting, the rejection, the bone-chilling fear. Parents who are willing to become the safe place, the Forever these children hope for but are too terrified to believe in just yet.

But "yet" is a powerful word in the context of faith, if we are indeed to believe in the unseen and hope for what has not materialized.

I followed a God into this story who heals and redeems, who restores wasted years and mends broken places. This God specializes in the Destroyed. I've seen it. I've been a part of it. I have His ancient Word that tells of it. I love a Jesus who made reconciliation his whole mission. My children will not remain broken. They are loved by too good a Savior. I will not remain exhausted and spent. I am loved by too merciful a Father.

So today, I'm writing for you who are somewhere "after the airport." The big moment is over and you are living in the aftermath when the collective grief or euphoria has passed. You lost a parent, a sibling, a friend, a child. The experience mobilized every single human being who loves you, and they rallied, gathered, carried you. And now it's three months later on a random Tuesday, and the sting has worn off for everyone else, and you are left in your sorrow.

I'm writing for those of you who had the oh-so-wanted baby after the cheers and showers and Facebook fervor, and now you're struggling with a depression so dark and deep, you are afraid to say it out loud. To you who moved across the country in obedience - you left your family, church, community, your jobs - and now the headline has passed and you are lonely and unanchored. For my friends who've brought their adopted children home and the media frenzy has died down, and you are holding a screaming toddler, a fragile kindergartener, an angry teen, trying to catch your breath and make it through the day without bawling while everyone else has gone back to their regularly scheduled programs...I'm with you today.

More importantly, God is with you today. He remains in the chaos long after it has lost its shine. When the delivered meals have stopped and the attention has waned, Jesus remains. He sticks with us long after it is convenient or interesting. If you feel alone today in your new normal, would you please receive this bit of beauty: this simple Scripture recited billions of times throughout the ages, perhaps without the poetry of David or precision of Paul, but with enough truth to sustain the weariest traveler:

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you" (Deut. 31:6).

He will never leave.

Never forsake.

Never.

For my readers who love someone living "after the airport," the big moment - be it a blessed high or a devastating low - is never the completion. The grief and struggle, the work and effort, the healing and restoring comes later. Will you call your friend who lost her mom to cancer five months ago? Will you check in on your friends who adopted this spring? Email your neighbor who took a big risk and moved or changed jobs or quit to stay home. For the love of Moses, do you have a friend who stepped out and started a church last year? Bring him a lasagna and do not be alarmed if he sobs into his french bread.


Trust me when I tell you that although we are all having hilarious moments like this:

And precious moments like this:

...we are still in the thick of hard, exhausting work, so if you ask me if these are the happiest days of my life (which a ton of you have), and my eyes kind of glaze over and I say through a tight-lipped smile like a robot, "Yes. Sure. Of course. This is my dream life"...I am lying. I am lying so you won't feel uncomfortable when I tell you, "Actually, I haven't had a shower in three days, I lost my temper with my uncontrollable daughter this morning and had to walk outside, I'm constantly cleaning up pee because uncircumcised tee-tee goes sideways onto walls, and sometimes when my two littles are asleep and we're downstairs with the original three kids who are so stable and healthy and easy, it creates a nostalgia so intense, I think I might perish. But enough about me. How are you?"

But that would be weird. So I say, "Yes. I am so happy."

If you are living "after the airport," how I wish I could transplant my community into your life; friends who have loved us so completely and exhaustively, I could weep just thinking about it. Maybe one of the most brilliant ways God "never leaves us" and "never forsakes us" is through the love of each other. Maybe He knew that receiving love from people with skin on is the most excellent way, so He gave us an entire set of Scriptures founded upon community and sacrificial love for one another. I guess He realized that if we obeyed, if we became more like His Son, then no one would ever want for mercy when their chips were down. No one. Good plan.

Oh let us be a community who loves each other well. Because someone is always struggling through the "after the airport" phase, when the chords of human kindness become a lifeline of salvation. Let us watch for the struggling members of our tribe, faking it through sarcasm or self-deprecation or a cheerfully false report. May we refuse to let someone get swallowed up in isolation, drowning in grief or difficulties that seem too heavy to let anyone else carry. Let's live this big, beautiful Life together, rescuing each other from the brink and exposing the unending compassion of our Jesus who called us to this high level of community; past the romantic beginnings, through the messy and mundane middles, and all the way to the depths.

Please sit down, because I am about to reveal something monumental, perhaps never before seen. With Remy in our home the last four weeks, Ben's miraculous Embassy clearance, and Brandon's spectacular reunion with him yesterday, I've had so many, many things to say, things I wanted to write through, things I wanted to share and show...

But no words.

Contain your shock. It won't last. It's some sort of temporary disorder, as I've never been short on words since the day some woman handed my mom the book, "Parenting the Strong-Willed Child" when I was two-years-old.

But the things I have to say are so deep and personal, so profound and overwhelming and constant, I've not been able to wrestle one thought to the ground long enough to write about it. My heart is Purgatory and these ideas are all stuck there, somewhere between the actual seconds they happened and the coherent, developed, processed account of them later. I'm riding the fence between wrangling deep, life-changing observations out of this season and - let's just be real - surviving until the next hour.

So I'm lassoing one idea that keeps circulating through my thoughts in between fetching Remy her thirty-eighth granola bar of the day and bribing her to bed with the promise of Chick-Fil-A fries. (My No-Compromise Organic Food Plan is shoved in the corner, beaten down and bloody, looking at me with eyes that clearly communicate: "Really? Flax seed over Cheezits? And you thought that dog would hunt? Idiot.)

This adoption has been a long journey for us, with lots of unexpected turns. To be sure, other families have endured much longer, much worse. Different countries have programs that run upwards of ten years. Other parents have lost savings accounts, friends, years, referrals, children. We've read stories that absolutely drained the blood from our faces.

So ours is certainly not the worst story, but it is ours, and it's the only one we have to tell.

As I look back over the last year and a half, I see a rhythm between God, our leader, and us, his clueless followers. The tune changed as the story unfolded, but the rhythm stayed the same.

It started after God made it *crystal clear* that we were to adopt two children. We applied for two kids. We got approved for two kids. We planned for two kids. We prepared our bio children for two kids. We told everyone we were adopting two kids.

And then we got our referral. For one girl.

Yes, this girl was beautiful. Yes, she was the perfect age for our family. Yes, we died over her shy smile (that was a clear fake out). Yes, her story broke our hearts and reminded us why we decided to adopt older children in the first place.

But where was our second child?? We were positive about this one. We couldn't have missed God's leadership on the two-kid agenda; it was one of those ridiculously clear moments where you either respond obediently or prepare to be immediately struck with cholera.

So this rhythm emerged:

"God, we're confused."
And he answered, "I'm not done yet."

As we begged for clarity and tried to decide if we should reject this referral out of sheer blind obedience, God nudged us toward the same darling boy we'd been eyeing on the Waiting Children's List. The one I had emailed our family coordinator about three times. The one she told me we'd have to get special approval for. The one with the 1000-watt smile, on a waiting list for his crime of being 7 years-old.

God reminded us, "Yes I said two, but I never said they'd be related. Go fight for that boy." Well, listen lambs, God doesn't tell me to fight for something lightly. Do I need to reference "The Strong Willed Child" observation again? Fight? Oh, I'll fight alright. What? I need to explain in writing why this placement makes sense for our family? A FIGHT WITH WORDS?? Bless the poor receiver of the footnoted dissertation I sent. And the phone calls I made. And the passionate plea (harassment) I unleashed. And just like that, we got our boy.

So three cheers! God really had a plan; an unconventional plan that required a half-crazed Mama who would enter the ring and use words and persuasion to win a referral. (My little eye spies some typecasting.) We had not one but two kids after all! And they happened to be the two cutest kids in the whole country, which we considered our prize for actually completing the 700,000 page dossier, which - let's get serious - was spearheaded by moi, and if you remember my bent toward details, well, this is really something noteworthy and please act impressed because (allegedly) I cannot remember to put gas in my car, yet I pulled off a completed dossier in three months including multiple check lists and a 50-pound page-protected binder that I would've rescued from a burning house before my three children.

Fast forward to March 10th, that blessed court date. Now understand that I had already informed God that I didn't want to be "one of those families." The sad, sorry folks who didn't pass and had all the troubles and waded through messy bureaucratic drivel and watched as everyone else passed them like they were going in reverse. The ones that clogged up the Facebook feed with bad news and had to answer the same questions twenty times a day about any movement? and who seemed like they had lost the will to live.

I mean, I thought I had made that clear.

So when Remy passed that very day like she was just taking a leisurely stroll through Central Park on holiday - exactly how I told God to work it out - we were devastated when Ben didn't pass. Devastated. And the rhythm repeated:

"God, we're confused."
"I'm not done yet."

We'd seen other families who didn't pass court get their clearance within a week or two, so we naturally assumed our happy phone call was coming any day now. Remy was submitted for Embassy. Any day now. One month. Any day now. The court asked for additional documents on Ben. Any day now. Remy was cleared for travel in April. Any day now. We turned in some other official decrees. Any day now. Two months. Any day now. Three months. Please, God. Please. Any day now. "It doesn't look good for this case." Any day now. Crying, begging, pleading, cursing. Any day now. Four months. No. No.

"God, we're confused."
"I'm not done yet."

Let me be fair: When I recount our line as "God, we're confused," that sounds tame, almost like a little old grandma who got lost at the corner of 5th and Lamar until a kindly police officer asked if he could help her and she chuckled and shook her head and said, "Well I guess I got a little confused!" and they shared a knowing laugh about who can figure out all these confounded streets down here? and he pointed her west and she made it to her destination just in time for the quilting guild.

When we said "we're confused", it involved crying and wailing and days when I couldn't get out of bed. It included a string of months where, I swear to you, time stood still. I sobbed over other people's happy adoption news as I typed nice words on their Facebook pages. It included a phone call from my mother-in-law after my daughter told her, "I'm worried about my mom." My hair started falling out in clumps and my fingernails peeled off in layers. I lashed out at Brandon and my kids and Jesus on bad days; on worse days, I wondered aloud if God had any control at all over this chaotic, broken world. I doubted his invervention and questioned his sovereignty.

So yeah, that's what I mean by "confused."

And then we got this: "We're getting a rejection letter for Beniam's adoption, and we think you should consider coming to get Remy." No. No. How could this possibly be our situation? How? We were the compassionate mother who refused to split the baby in half even if it meant separation from us. How could we go back to Ethiopia and fly away with just one of them? How could we break our son's heart like that? How could God possibly be in this? Is he just mean? Has he forgotten us? Has he forgotten Ben? This is not the story we signed on for. This chapter stinks. I'm starting to hate this book.

"God, we're confused."
"I'm not done yet."

In the dead of night as I sobbed into my pillow, begging God to comfort our son as we prepared to travel for Remy, he delivered "Love Ben" fully developed into my mind. And if you're the believing type who buys the "God works all things for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose" stuff, then you might not be surprised to hear that we witnessed hundreds of moments of glory through Love Ben.

Hundreds.

Like the 80-year-old outspoken racist who set his alarm for 1:00am to pray for Beniam at the start of the Ethiopian work day.

Like the multiple emails I got from adopted adults who were prompted to reconcile with birth parents, deal with decades-old wounds, and find peace.

Like the birth mother whose heart God healed after giving up her son 17 years ago.

Like the entire church who highlighted Ben's story and set up a Love Ben Photo Booth after both services.

Like the college friend who told me she was praying again for the first time in 20 years.

Like the bundles of you who emailed to say you've decided to adopt.

Like the mamas and daddies who taught their children about orphans and God's mercy and used Ben's little face as a tangible tool.

Please believe me, these could go on and on. Rays of God's light kept bursting through the dark. Just when I though my heart would expire, I'd get an email that said, "I told Ben's story at the camp we're running for foster kids, and they broke out in spontaneous prayer and singing for God to rescue him."

Evidently God can wrestle glory out of the hard parts of the story.

Ben passed court the week before we traveled to get Remy, but our agency prepared us for egregious delays and possible litigation at the Embassy stage because of his rejection letter (I assure you, this had nothing to do with his orphan status). So Brandon and I prepared for a fight. We threw down fighting words. We said stuff like, "What happens in fight club stays in fight club!" We kicked some chairs over and threw gang signs. We were all, "WHATEVER, HATERS! You messed with the wrong peeps!" It was all super aggressive with loads of swagger.

Then we flew to Ethiopia. And held our son while he threw up and sobbed in our laps and clung to our necks, as we drove away with Remy, his only family on the same continent. And all the bravado disappeared into sorrow. I cried for 24 hours without stopping.

"We're so confused, God."
"I'm not done yet."

Are you sure, God? Because I'm pretty convinced all our hearts are broken. Is there work left to be done? Is there something we can't see? Would you please just assure us that you haven't forgotten Ben and our family? Can we trust you to make this beautiful? Because it doesn't feel beautiful. It feels aching and devastating and horribly unjust. We believe you but we can't see.

But let it be said that God is still in the miracle business. As our agency prepared to submit Ben for Embassy, they were asked to try to secure his approval letter one last time, attempting to avoid the cluster ahead of us without it. Just as a courtesy, our agency went back to the government office, the same one who refused to write the letter for five months, in an effort I dubbed "the biggest waste of time on planet earth." They'd made their position clear on Ben's case, and had already died on this hill if you will. So whatever. Thanks for this great idea, Embassy. Maybe they can suck another five months of our lives away.

They wrote it.

SHUT UP. Yes they did. They wrote it on a Thursday, and Ben was submitted for Embassy the very next day. With all his paperwork intact. Every last piece of paper. They cleared him for travel four business days later on Thursday, and Brandon got on a plane three days later. Last Sunday.

When God said he wasn't done yet, he just wasn't done yet. He wasn't speaking in code. It wasn't a trick. The story was still in the middle, but I wanted to flip ahead to the end, past the conflict and struggle and straight to the happy ending. As Keeper of the Story, God knew the whole plot. He promised us way back that he planned on seeing these two children all they way from brokenness and abandonment to our home in Texas, an unlikely journey if ever there was one. And at the risk of whitewashing the difficult middle, we have one of them here and the other will be here Sunday, so he was faithful.

God doesn't promise us a clean middle part of the story. He never said we wouldn't encounter antagonists and drama and surprise twists and heartbreak. We weren't assured a G-rated plot where good feelings are peddled and no one dies or leaves or fails or waits. God promised things like healing and restoration and redemption. Which implies there will be injuries and broken relationships and losses. When he speaks of beauty from ashes, he seems to know there will be actual ashes to resurrect beauty from.

If you are confused right now, if your story isn't going the way you thought, or if you're tangled up in the messy middle where hope is deferred, dear reader, it could just be that God isn't done yet. Your story is not finished. Every hero and heroine must wade through the conflict to get to the end, and you can trust God because he is good. If you have nothing else to cling to, remember this: God is good. He loves goodness and justice. He heals and redeems. He is on the side of love and beauty. He is for you. He is never against you. You may be against you, other people may be against you, but God is not against you.

It is okay to be confused; I'm afraid that is our lot as finite creatures dealing with an infinite God. Some of God's best heros were confused in their subplots. But I can see a light that is coming for the heart that holds on. Because God is good and he is for goodness.

And he just isn't done yet.

Last Friday, I woke up at 3:30am, caught the earliest flight to Nashville, hung out with a few thousand crazy women, taught for one hour, and flew home. It was the 2011 MOPS Convention, and trust me, this thing is always a good time. They brought in Max Lucado, Mandisa, Travis Cottrell, Lisa Harper, Jon Acuff, Steven Curtis Chapman, Kathi Lipp, and a bunch of other rock stars this year. I slid in and pretended like I had any business being there.

Women kept saying, "We can't believe you're here! How do you feel about being here?? Was it so hard to leave? With Remy at home??" And after deciding to say the true thing instead of the nice thing, I answered: "It feels awesome."

Whatever. It did.

Assuming we would bring home our two new darlings this SPRING, I basically took this year off from traveling and teaching. If you would've told me in February that we would bring only one kid home at the end of July, I would've punched you in the spleen. So I haven't taught this year at all, and lawd have mercy, I've missed it.

Of course, I laid awake the night before, fretting like I often do before a talk. Here I was headed to MOPS Convention, where all the mamas are measuring their days in poop blowouts and mourning the loss of peeing in private, and rather than bring a helpful message on how to just get through the freaking day, I'm bringing a discussion on our postmodern children and how to let them fail and maybe go to Africa instead of college.

You can see why I'm so popular.

But even after sweating it out pre-session in the bathroom (for 20 minutes), fussing over my notes and wondering for the thousandth time why God always makes me talk about these things when other speakers get to talk about fun things, I remembered after the session why this sort of stuff is my deal. When the women flood the book table with tears and stories and that look on their faces, and they nod and grab me by the hands and say:

Yes.
I get it.
This is how I've been feeling.
This is what my husband says.
This is what my kids say.
I was just having this conversation.
I've been trying to explain this.
My heart is saying there has got to be more.
This is my tension.

Then I remember: God is doing something big and deep and important in the body of Christ right now, and I am but one tiny little voice joining a chorus. The Holy Spirit is moving and messing a lot of us up right now, and I may have the words, but thousands, millions of us are having the same feelings.

So as promised, I'm posting all my "notes" from my session, a term I'm using loosely here since I went through my notes and expanded/decoded all the cryptic chicken scratch and basically transcribed the entire hour+ talk. I was going to include just the modern/postmodern discussion, but then I couldn't find a good stopping place and then all of a sudden I was at the end.

I would love to hear your input, folks, because this is stuff we better take seriously as parents and Christ-followers. We are raising a different generation than the one we grew up in. The tension many of us carry with the gospel and the church and authority in general is undoubtedly the theme song of our kids' generation, and they are headed into the next phase of culture, with or without us. Let's make sure it is "with."

Without further ado...the quantity of notes I'm about to post is ridiculous, the formatting is all jacked, and if you actually get through this and still have something coherent to add at the end, I will give you a cash prize.


Life is messy. Parenting is messy. Kids are messy. The Christian life is messy. And that is ok.
• Our worst enemy as moms is trying to maintain the illusion of control. And not just because it’s hard to keep that up, but because it actually sabotages our own and our kids’ spiritual development.
o It substitutes some “ideal, dream life” for the one we actually see in Scripture, which is laced with adventure and risk and failure and sacrifice and transparency.
o The whole concept of “letting go” begins in our hearts and minds. The practical application comes second, not first. This is something I wish I’d heard when my kids were babies. I think I would’ve found a lot of freedom I craved in those early years
o The time to define your parenting philosophy is now.

Defining characteristics of our kids’ generation:
• We are standing on the fault line of a huge paradigm shift in our culture, and it is a transition from one worldview to another. Most of us have a foot in both.
• Not an endorsement or a criticism - both views have the fingerprint of God in them…neutral information, but this is the world our kids are growing up in, so it is essential to our discussion of parenting. We can’t parent what we don’t understand.

BOIL THIS WAY DOWN, a total reductionist explanation:

Modern thought was the driving worldview for the last 3 centuries: Birthed through the Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, modern invention, opened up “The Age of Reason”:
• Marked by: rational linear thinking, pragmatic thought, science, education, dogmatism, individualism, fundamentalism and absolute truth, authority was unquestioned and respected…emphasis on the individual man’s capabilities, logic, and knowledge
o Modern soundbyte: “I have all the answers, and so can you.”
o Affected how the Christian life was interpreted: faith was proved through factual research (systematic theology classes abounded), apologetics was the primary evangelical tool, come to Christ as a logical, measurable decision (I walked the aisle when I was nine…)
• Christianity was tightly organized around gaining biblical knowledge -“discipleship”
o Modern thought affected Christian parenting:
• The drive to control our environment, plus black-and-white thinking created a very one-way relationship btw parents and kids:
• I am the authority. The end. That is all that should matter to you.
• The rhythm of family life was not a discussion or a group process
• “The way things are” and “the way we think and believe” was pretty much set by the parents, and questions weren’t encouraged.

Postmodern thought is the prevalent mindset/worldview of people today, specifically our kids. So love it or hate it or ignore it, this is the world our kids will grow up in and marry and have children and discover Jesus, so we owe it to them to take a careful look at what it is and be careful and humble learners:
• Marked by: spirituality, experience, community, betterment of the world, justice, creativity, relative truth, environmentalism, globalism, deconstruction/skepticism, and authenticity
o Postmodern soundbyte: “I don’t have all the answers, and neither do you.”
• Our kids are part of a postmodern generation who is highly skeptical of authority and aren’t going to believe or do something because of tradition
o They’ve been let down by parents, government, spiritual leaders…
o They are going to understand God through story and community and justice, not apologetics and dogmatic theology.
• Most churches are still operating out of a modern mindset, and you’ll notice that teens and young adults are FLOODING out of the church.
• PM’s have a genuine distrust of organized religion and perceive it to be arrogant and consumer-obsessed.
• They will respond to parenting marked by humility and authenticity, not control and power.
o They will be moved by how we live for Jesus far more than what we say about him.
o They want to experience the rich, meaningful Jesus…not be entertained or impressed.
o Consumerism to the neglect of a suffering world will turn our kids off. If we want to bring them deeper in the heart of Jesus, we are going to have to care about the people Jesus cared about.
o Our deeds will matter far more than our creed. PM’s want authenticity above all else, so empty words have no chance.
• We must consider this paradigm shift, because the words we’ve puppeted for years have lost their meaning and will be mostly ineffective with our kids.
o We can try to shove a square peg in a round hole, but maybe we should be willing to learn about this postmodern generation, let go a little here and parent the kids we have, not the kids we were.
o Bottom line: Knowing they WILL EVENTUALLY buck dogmatic authority and hyper-controlling Mamas, we have to parent our kids wisely, first through the grid of the gospel and second through the grid of their culture.

Phase 2: Letting go of some old dreams for our kids that are not only unbiblical, but they will rob our children of their true life’s work.
How can we unhinge our kids from the dream this world wants to sell them and attach them securely to God’s dream for their lives? Jesus made his dream for us very clear, and he called it “the kingdom.”
What is the kingdom?
• Jesus described the kingdom constantly, in sort of cryptic ways:
o It’s a new way of living, like a hidden treasure, like yeast changing the dough, it belongs to the poor and meek and the humble and children, it is precious and surprising, the arrogant can’t even recognize it in front of their faces, the lower you are, the easier the kingdom is to embrace
• “kingdom” = “dream”…Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven = God, may all your dreams for this planet come true.
o God has dreams for us: salvation, mission, redemption, community…
o God has dreams for this earth: no more hunger, healed families, healed land, justice, His glory…
• This is the dream we want to plant deeply into our children’s hearts.
• What dream are we giving them? Most of us are imprinting our kids with the American Dream
o Most of our parenting choices, goals, efforts are geared toward their success, happiness, security, comfort, and prosperity
o We sprinkle Jesus in there but not enough to alter their entire life’s course– more like a system for acting good
• We take our kids’ lives and add Jesus to it; don’t start with Jesus’ kingdom and process our kids lives through it. True biblical dreams for our kids are so rare:
• How many of us are dreaming that our kids will live among the poor one day? Or foster a bunch of kids? Or spend their lives on justice? Or love Jesus to the exclusion of every normal sounding achievement?

o This old way is not holding.
• We are not making disciples. The postmodern generation is rejecting the church in record numbers.
• Our kids are not going to be afraid of risk and sacrifice like we are, and they are unwilling to turn a blind eye to the brokenness of the world, so if the dream we teach them is about gaining the treasures of this world while behaving and tithing, that is not inspiring enough to keep their loyalty.
o Our goal is not to get them to behave well; our goal is to teach them to love Jesus in the most reckless, single-minded way.
• I have a daughter telling me she might bow out of college for awhile to live in Africa.
• I have a son who can’t stand children’s church because he cannot see what the silly songs and videos and craft projects have to do with the Jesus he knows from the Bible. 9 years old.
• A couple of months ago, our teenagers from church slept on the streets downtown for an entire weekend to identify with the homeless and walk a day in their shoes.
• Are we willing to get ok with this? Because this is the heartbeat of the next generation, WITH OR WITHOUT US.

• We love Romans 8:28 for our kids, but do we actually understand the very next verse?
o Being “conformed into the image of Jesus” is not a pretty process, because our kids are born into sin and God has messy, real work to do to transform them into disciples.
• This process involves sacrifice and loss and struggle and failure and courage and maybe even danger and cultivating a single-minded obsession with the kingdom.
• They may embarrass us or disappoint us or scare us as they wrestle with God, but can we see his redemptive hand in their lives even then?
• When have we grown the most? Changed the deepest? STRUGGLE. Failure. Loss. Risky obedience. Messy relationship mending.
• Our kids are the same. Our job is not to shield them from everything hard, but to parent them through it with wisdom and discernment.
• We should not pull our kids completely out of this culture in some sort of parallel Christian universe, but teach them to navigate the real world with grace and conviction.
o This requires a gradual process of letting go, so our kids can actually live a real life with real people and real problems and discover the real God who shows up there.

What do we do???

There are some postmodern ideals that line up nicely with the kingdom, and if we want to raise children who love Jesus passionately and pour their lives out for his kingdom, we need to capitalize on them.

1.) PM’s are wildly attracted to those who love the unlovely and care about the poor.
a. Guess who else is into that? Jesus. He’s obsessed.
b. Want to show your children the Jesus they’ll follow for life? Love broken, poor, marginalized people. Love them like crazy.
i. Your attention to the poor and unlovely will go a million miles further with your kids than checking off a devotional every night.
ii. Giving you permission to pull out of some Christian program to make space for actual ministry, particularly to the marginalized (Do we really need to serve the saved any more?)
c. Have littles? This can fit into your life.
i. Open your home, take sandwiches to the homeless in your city one afternoon, connect with foster kids and families, sponsor international kids, send care packages to orphanages, let your kids see you hug necks and kiss cheeks and pray with hurting people and welcome them into your life.
ii. Pepper your language and prayers with words about people at the bottom.
iii. Make tangible financial sacrifices YOUR KIDS CAN SEE and reallocate that money to the most desperate people you can find.
1. You cannot put a price on this sort of discipleship.
2. Be warned: this is transformative for you too.


2.) PM kids will respond to authenticity and honesty and genuine parents, as opposed to a very controlling, dogmatic appearance-based approach.
a. Don’t hear me say we should all be loosey-goosey, hippie-dippy parents who have no rules and just live by their feeeeeeeelings.
i. We are still responsible for leading our children in the ways of Jesus, but our kids will be watching for transparency…I cannot tell you how much this will matter.
b. This gets real tangled up with how we want people to think of us.
i. We’re uncomfortable with failure; ours and certainly our kids. Our instincts tell us to protect our image to a watching world as moms who are doing everything right and whose kids are always happy and well-behaved
ii. This creates bondage, because in the name of measuring up, we’re doing our kids a real disservice by robbing them of the messiness that is the actual Christian life and preparing them for an unreal world where sin and problems are hidden away and only accomplishments are paraded
1. Bible is clear: Hiding produces shame.
2. Shame sometimes prevents bad behavior, but it doesn’t bring life or freedom or grace

c. False or unrealistic expectations can destroy a healthy family.
i. Some of you didn’t expect what you have (more babies by now, less babies by now, difficult child, child with special needs, job situation you don’t want, you want to be home, you want to be back at work….)
1. Let go of what you expected, and embrace what you have
a. The tug of war between expected and actual is what kills the spirit.
ii. God does his best work in reality. That gap between expected and actual is where grace takes over.
1. Tell your kids: It’s ok to mess up. I don’t expect you to be perfect and I will not be a perfect parent. Say those words, and you’ll create a house of grace.
2. Let them risk something and fail…even if you knew they would.
3. Then teach them what to do with failure: this will serve them the rest of their lives: we apologize, we try again, we try a different way, we learn from it, we don’t regret every mistake.
4. Say “I’m sorry” often and sincerely. Accept your kids’ apologies.
5. Let them enter a hard or challenging or difficult relationship with your guidance….you do the same and let your kids watch you navigate it with grace and truth.
6. Help your kids make amends for their mistakes without shaming or humiliating them. Act proud of how they respond to failure, not just when they get things right the first time.
a. They’ll learn that they can mess up, and no one will die.

d. Imagine your role as a coach rather than a dictator; this perspective will help our kids move from dependence to independence, and it eliminates the controlling approach we know our kids will rebel against.
i. Shift in thinking: “What do you want to accomplish?” and guide them into making their own decisions on how to get there.
ii. A coach asks good questions: What would it look like if…?
iii. Keep their goals in front of them, and shut down the lecture circuit.
iv. Speak of God’s plan for their lives from the time they are in diapers:
1. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” What would ‘well done’ look like here? What would servanthood look like here?


3.) Trust God that he is playing a crucial role in our kids’ lives, and we are just one piece of their story; we can fail and make all sorts of heinous mistakes, and God is still sovereign over our children. We are not responsible for controlling every minute detail of their lives.
a. Our authority over them is only the first small fraction of their timeline, but God’s leadership lasts their entire lives. We better get them properly introduced.
i. Let’s teach our kids to love Jesus, not a set of rules. We should be talking about his character and love and passion and heroics as much as we are talking about biblical behaviors.
b. As we consider the scary concept of letting them go, hear this: Our kids will not get lost in culture if they have experienced the dynamic, loving, radical Jesus.
i. If they know him in a life-changing way, they will learn to engage culture as a change agent and advocate without getting tainted by its influence.
ii. This is how God designed the kingdom. He raises up disciples and releases them on the planet.
1. There is no prototype for this. Your kids don’t have to fit an image or a mold or follow a specific script and neither do you.
2. God has always allowed every sort of personality and quirk and unlikely disciple into the family.
c. Believe it or not, the kids who go to Sunday School and Awanas and don’t drink in high school and go to college and vote Republican and keep everything between the lines are not a discipleship-prototype. Just let go of that notion.
i. There are actually all sorts of radical, unconventional pathways in the kingdom.
1. It’s made up of artists and dreamers and rapscallions and risk-takers and strange birds and dark horses and redeemed screw-ups and even suburban moms.
2. Do not fear if you or your family or your child colors outside the lines or wanders down unlikely roads or zigs left when everyone else zigs right, because if they love Jesus and contend for his glory in their few days on this earth, then they will indeed hear one day, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”