Saturday, April 19, 2014

Expecting Love

We are expecting, but not the way we did three times before. We are choosing the unknown to extend love outside of our biological family. I am excited and scared and hopeful and confident about the choice.

A new person or people will join our family sometime in the next several months. It could be a boy, a girl, two boys, two girls. It could be an infant, or it could be a preschooler. Or both. They could stay with us for days, or forever. In short, we are moving toward foster care/adoption.

Yesterday I taught Haven and Maiya the definitions of adopted, foster and biological children. I asked them why children go into foster care and their answers were clear and concise. We brainstormed about why fostering children might be fun and why it might be hard. One is more excited than the other, which is interesting. It was just that way when I was pregnant with Tristan. Once he was born, they swapped and one was more excited and the other more cautious until we adjusted to the change.

Part of our foster/adopt application included a family drawing by each of the kids. They were asked to include the foster child or children in the drawing and write something if they wanted to. Maiya drew a picture of Dave and Tristan in the house, me outside, and prominently, in the middle of the page, Haven, another little girl and herself walking on a huge rainbow. The little girl was jumping rope and smiling. Haven's drawing included 7 of us lined up, smiling. Tristan was tucked between Dave and me and Haven, Maiya and 2 foster children were lined up next to us. His caption read, "I will love to have a new part of the family." Tristan's picture was just as heartfelt, I'm sure, but more difficult to decipher.

So far Dave and I attended 2 foster parent classes. These classes are meant to educate and scare us. They are meant to bring the reality of foster care into focus. This week a class member asked the insightful question, "How do we love these children like they are our own with the knowledge they may not always be with us?" There is only one answer to this: prepare to be hurt.

Who would do this?! Who opts for pain? I see lots of people in history who gave up their comfort for the benefit of another, and our family is honored to learn from their remarkable legacies. When we lived in New Jersey we went to a church where the pastor reminded us over and over again, "If you are blessed, it is so that you can be a blessing." We now go to a church in New York and the pastor uses a long piece of rope as the church "mascot." In the center of the rope is about an inch of black electrical tape. This tape represents our life and the rope represents eternity. We spend so much time focusing on the life we have and spend little time thinking about what will happen after it ends.

Whether you believe in God and a spiritual eternity or not, we all know that how we live now impacts others after we are gone. I want to get to the end of my black tape and know that I was more than just happy, more than just comfortable.

This Easter I am thinking about sacrificial love. Love which stays and looks at a broken and selfish person (newsflash: that's all of us) and says, "I see you completely and I love you." That is the kind of love that revolutionizes. This is the way God loves us all. It is the kind of love that is worth sowing into a person, even if we don't get to see what it grows. So, we are expecting. We do not know who to expect, but know we can expect to learn a lot, we can expect to grow. Most of all, we can expect to love.