The Rest Of The Story

I thought long and hard about titling this post "Adoption Is Not for Sissies."

I've recently finished re-posting the entries from Daniel's adoption trip 5 years ago.  It was wonderful to re-read them myself as I prepared to post them.

And it was hard to re-read them myself as I prepared to post them.

I didn't have a blog back then.  With each of our adoptions until Lily Kay's, I posted entries to a website during our actual time in China so that our friends/family could "travel" along with us...but then stopped posting once we got home.  So the story of Daniel's early days with us abruptly ends once we got home, except for one update I did at 6 weeks home.

Here is The Rest of the Story of those early months home with Daniel in a nutshell:

It. was. hard.

It was shocking to me, after the Sunshine-and-Roses time we'd had when adding Elisabeth and Noah to our family.

It was hard.

I've thought and thought, typed and erased and re-typed on this post for a week now.  What I've come to is that I don't feel that I can/should go into many details...but I felt like it would almost be lying to leave this unsaid.  For those who don't know us IRL, or who didn't know us back then...I don't want anyone to see our family picture and think that you just adopt children and add them right into your family and everything keeps trucking right along and is hunky dory.  It just ain't so.

I mean - prayerfully - you get to "hunky dory" one day.

But adoption is hard.

Adoption is love. And faith.  And hope.

Adoption is loss.  And trauma. And grief.

Adoption is hard.

But....

Adoption is God's heart.  And when He calls you to adopt - as when He calls you to anything - He is right there with you all the way.  Leading. Guiding. Growing. Stretching.

And He brings redemption.  He restores the years the locusts have eaten.  And He blesses.  And He has - praise His holy name - brought our family to where we are now.  And this?  Is a good place to be.

And He gets all the credit for that.