Soul Food

Sometimes the hardest decision is the smallest one. Now that we've been wrestling with what it means to adopt, we're at the point of deciding how to move forward. We both are on board. We believe God is preparing our hearts and home for a little one, but what does that mean? An infant through workings here in San Diego? A toddler from the foster system? A 3-year-old from another country who has faced more terror and trauma than I will ever have to go through? Adoption is terrifying, yet my heart keeps getting pulled to those who are so loved they need a new home for their best hope.  I think our hearts are strengthening and stretching and molding for some tough love and challenges that come with kiddos whose family extends beyond the confines of blood.

I struggle with adoption because I don't want it to be a savior complex or thinking I can fix the world’s problems or be some sort of saint. But over and over again, this is where I hear God whispering, “This is what I'm preparing you for. All those years of darkness and cocooning and waiting are refining your heart and resolve to be a home for some of my dearly loved children. All that time of breaking and redefining who and whose you are so that you won't be lost in the deep waters of the hardship to come.” I know this path isn't for everyone. I didn't even think it was our path. But we serve a good good Father who takes his time teaching and preparing, using the consequences of a free will world always always always for His good, His glory, His restoration. And because it's in concert with, not in spite of or on top of, us this restoration work is long and hard and often doesn't look like it's bearing fruit. 

I think that's one of this reasons I have grown to enjoy gardening recently. 

It takes time to plant, water and hopefully produce. You have to be diligent, not skipping a day of watering or harvesting, carefully pruning away the dead to make room for the living. Slowing down to untangle the plant from itself. At the scale we have, gardening is not an economic way of providing our food. The water, soil and time put into a couple tomato plants that just produce tomatoes, TONS of tomatoes, is more expensive than going to the store and buying a couple tomatoes when it is convenient. That's not why Alec planted a garden, though. And that's not how God works, doing whatever is most convenient for Him. Growing is messy, difficult work that sometimes gives you 200 tomatoes and sometimes gives you a plant half dug up by the neighborhood cat. The ROI for us amateur gardeners is small and unpredictable. However. Those extra tomatoes get shared with neighbors and friends, eating our hard earned veggies together. Those torn up plants get shared with neighbors and friends, learning lessons together. We grow tomatoes and relationships and souls. We leave the 99 to find the one. We pour our expensive perfume on each other’s feet. And man, that soul food is worth more than a store tomato.  So it is with our Master Gardener. Investing and pruning and developing us to bear His fruit. To some of us, the fruit of that gardening is a home for just one or two children of God who may require a lot of pruning and water and fertilizer to even look like the rest of the plants in the garden. It's not economical and it's not efficient. Oh, but how the soil of our hearts, my heart, has been tilled for such as these. 

It's never convenient to live in the scandalous economy of grace, the upside-down world of the Kingdom of God. It's messy and sometimes silent and may not look like it's producing anything of value by the world’s standards. Growing our family has looked like this for the past four years. Yet I feel a softening rain a comin’. A nod from the Gardener that the soil of our hearts is ready for what's on the horizon. It's going to be challenging and will require daily watering and may not look like much to the rest of the world. It may only produce one average child. But what a glorious way to be part of the restoration of this world back to the One who created it and called it good.