Our Holy Chaos

Our Holy Chaos attempts to find God amid our family’s ups and downs. Last month was more down than up, but God was still there. We have been pursuing the adoption of a boy from China since 2019. We were about a week from traveling to complete adoption when China shut down in February, 2020. We’ve been on a waiting roller coaster ever since. There has been good news and bad news, but we always expected that completing adoption of this little boy was a matter of time. Until last month. In early September, China announced that they were no longer processing international adoptions. Period. Our Department of State is asking for clarity and pushing for adoptions with a matched child—like ours and many others—to proceed to completion, but they are not optimistic. We’ve always known this was possible. On one hand, we consider this boy our son. His smiling face hangs on our wall alongside pictures of our other biological and adopted children. He’s one of us in all ways except geography and cit...

Everything felt right for the first time in a long time. I was 30,000 feet over Florida heading to a conference. The flight was smooth, I had been up since 2:45 that morning, and the cabin was quiet. Peaceful. Our second adoption from China was still a stressful roller coaster. My work still had issues that needed solving. My family was far behind me and my heart ached for them. But, I felt that God had these things under control. Gratitude filled me as soon as I noticed the feeling of peace. It was a gift. A strong desire to respond welled up in me. My mind started racing. I wanted to do something. Maybe I should write an article about the experience. Or I could contemplate how God was acting and what he wanted me to take away from the experience. Perhaps I could figure out how to make this feeling happen again when I felt stressed. Then I received another gift. A small voice asked me to let all of that go and just be grateful. My reaction was normal enough. When someone does somethin...