In This Wilderness

I’m on my way home from the Three Angels girls getaway I blogged about last week, and I can’t wait to tell you all about it when I get back to my desk! In the meantime, I wanted to share this beautiful blog post written by one of the other moms in our group. Her name is Esty, and I’m so grateful to be on this journey with her.

“I was in your bible study a year ago and we were praying for your daughter to come home, where is she? When did she come home?”

It is Orphan Sunday in America. Outside my home church’s front doors, a gracious retiree has stopped me to inquire about my daughter, one of the millions of international fatherless children, but this one with a name. One whom my community can picture: a future daughter, sister, cousin, granddaughter, playmate…a future church nursery-attending, Goldfish cracker-eating, grinning former orphan that they have been praying home for almost 2 years now.

“She is not home yet.”, I tell her, shock registering in her kind eyes, “it is just a long process.” Then I add too brightly, with a smile I keep reserved for this kind of moment of falsely optimistic salesmanship: “But, keep praying!”

Good, kind, people who inquire about my daughter are so very dear to me – dear to us all who share this journey. People who ask (in person) give me the opportunity to hear her name and share her latest picture- the one I still cannot post online or blog about.

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This particular wilderness of Haitian adoption under the New Process and the New Law is outstandingly barren because almost nobody on Earth has traversed this particular process. This is like climbing the magically misdirected Grand Staircase at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts: it constantly shifts and drops you at an impossible-to-predict location. We are in it ’til the end though, because there is no withdrawing from our child – our own flesh and blood in a Haitian body.

This wilderness would be impossible without Jesus.

He isn’t here on Earth, but His Body is, and they hand us manna- that which we absolutely need in this drought of waiting- and we can survive. 

Some of the sweetest manna comes in the form of other Parents of the children who live with my daughter at her orphanage. These women, my sisters, the mothers of my daughter’s Haitian “cousins”, who share with one another every victory, every homecoming, every prayer request, every agony, are my lifeboat in these uncharted waters. We have found one another, almost every last one of us, and share life intentionally now, daily, speaking in shorthand, holding nothing back. We know the joys, exhaustion, and tears well, and there is no need for us to explain anything to one another. We understand the lingo, the new steps, the judges and mayors and social workers- all involved in the arduous job of completing our families. In this tiny demographic of adoptive parents, shrunk to the size of only Haitian adoptive parents, even further the parents of the 13 children from the same orphanage on a single street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti – we have found one another here in the United States. We know our children are being raised as siblings would be, so we invest in one another’s lives, one another’s children at home and at the orphanage- hoping our children will be linked permanently, and seek to forge our bond for always. We steal away time to cry together, time to vent, time to celebrate- building traditions and reaching for ways to hold up one another’s arms in the midst of the greatest wait of our lives. We are incredibly blessed to have each other and you’d better believe we know it. The photos posted on Facebook and Instagram of the other children at my child’s orphanage aren’t just “Nicodette” or “Steevenson” or “Gregory”, they’re my friend’s son, and my friend’s daughter. We have each other and we are the manna Jesus has given to us in this wilderness as we circle, waiting for deliverance.

All the prayers, all the hopes: we need every last one, and we thank you for keeping it up. Jesus is nearer still when His Body draws close and huddles and cries out together…the 3-strand cord braiding further. He is Deliverer and He is Creator, and He is creating still.

(Left to right: Jenn, Tacy, Kim, me, Esty and Jess)