FULL

My life feels very full today!  Full of chaos, huge messes to clean and 3 amazing kids to love.  My life is full.  My heart is full.  My eyes are full of tears.  I feel my heart throbbing inside my chest about to explode.  It seems as though the last several weeks of our lives have been, yes a blur, but perhaps a bit of an intentional one made by myself to protect my heart with numbness so as not to break at all of the emotion that could be felt during such a transaction as the one that just took place.  


I remember the first day in Rwanda after meeting Aliyah for the first time and holding her fragile body close to our warm hearts.  She was so broken inside and we wanted to be strong for her.  But laying her back in her crib at the end of the day would have broken me and I would not allow myself weakness for her.   So I went numb.  It was a good thing I think.  I needed to get through it all in one piece and if I'd experience the HUGENESS of what this all was, I'm not sure I would have.


The first week home was adrenaline.  Disregard my last post.  Yes, there is still a deep overall peace, but man is it chaotic and a wee bit hard to juggle all of this right now.  The second week was sheer exhaustion.  Just trying to survive even under the best of circumstance and blessing.  Adjustment to anything new is tiring.  And tired we are.  Week three (has it been that long?) has been a revisiting of Rwanda.  It's like I needed to go back.  My heart needed to relive what it skipped over 6 weeks ago.  I've been editing pictures and making a slide show of our experience and it is bringing it all back to the surface. 


I think my emotional processing has really just begun and I almost hope for that because today what feels full is my absolute WONDER and AWE at Jesus Christ.  His love is almost too much!  I can't describe with words how intense I feel when I think of Him loving on me and seeking me out to rescue me and to pull me out of my yuck and to hold me tenderly and call me His own.  This is SOOO not about Aliyah.  This is so much a story of God's reckless pursuit of our souls and the tender, compassionate, Fatherly relationship He chooses to have with us!  It's amazing and wonderful and beyond words I can write or think of.


Tonight was spent with our dearest friends who love on our family more than any other I've known in my lifetime.  We spent the evening worshiping, reading scripture, singing songs, and relishing the fact that we have a God who SEES us and KNOWS us and LOVES us and LEADS us.  He never leaves us ALONE.  He does not ABANDON or DECEIVE, but He recklessly and passionately PURSUES.  He is indescribable and vast and beyond our wildest imagination!!  Gosh, I'm gushing and I'm frustrated to not find words...


Then I come home to packages of gifts from our sweet family and from some group of women that are friends of my moms that I don't even know but who love Aliyah.  No, it's not about Aliyah.  It is about WHO they are seeing when they hear her story.  This blessing we get to be a part of and this precious wonderful little girl that we get to love and watch grow is just the side note.  God's love for us is the main text.  And He is making Himself so beautiful through her!!


I'll blog soon about how great she is and how much fun we are having with her and all the sweet ways my boys are loving on her, but for now...It's about Jesus, my loving Heavenly Father! 


Easter Sunday will be Aliyah's 1st birthday.  What a sweet way to see the full picture of all that God is allowing us to see and be a part of through our journey of adoption.  


To God be the Glory!!

"This is an image of a piece of “empty” sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. It turns out that deep space looks like this in all directions. Galaxies everywhere. The current estimate is that there are something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the universe.

Everything you see in this image is a galaxy, each containing billions of stars. Some of these hundred million light-years distant. Some are billions of light-years from us..."

And God made it and knows us by name!!  

GO FIGURE!