Winter Blessings

It’s official… We have received approval from the Chinese government to adopt our new son. We can now tell the world and celebrate publicly. Welcome Jackson Chao Ju Alan Barringer!  This has all just transpired so there is a lot we don't know.  As the days go by, we will update here when we will travel, who will be going, how you can pray.  Meanwhile....

Exceed / Hold Up

Here is everything we do know:
Chao means “exceed”
Ju means “hold up”
We love these names
He is 5 ½ years old
He is from the Henan province, and he lives in the Pingdingshan Social Welfare Institute (orphanage)
He is named for three godly men. His daddy,
CS “Jack” Lewis, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson
We love him


Once upon a time in the cotton fields of Missouri, I played with my baby dolls in the hot summer sun, and imagined a life of motherhood. I don’t believe I’d ever heard of adoption. Or infertility. Or of how hard life is. There were hints of pain, whispers of tragedy, but by and large I thought that those things wouldn’t happen to me when I was “big".


When I got big, grew up and went looking for work, I applied for my first full-time job at a bank. The manager asked me where I saw myself in ten years. I smiled and said, “Being a mama.” He didn't hire me.


It took a few more years than the ten I’d predicted in that interview, but I did get the mama job.


Have you ever wrestled with Palm 37:4, the part that says that God will give you the desires of your heart. I have struggled with it, and sometimes railed against it. Does it mean He gives you those things you desire, like a Divine Dispenser of the good things you ask for, or that He places the desires within you and you are left to grapple with them?


Could I have known all those years ago, a silly young woman in a business suit and too high heels, sitting in a bank, what “being a mama” would bring?


What if I had known? I would not have changed my mind, but perhaps I would have said it with a little more dignity. A little more gravity.


Motherhood is a fearsome and wonderful calling. There is joy unimaginable. Fulfillment found nowhere else. And yet, for me, it has had it’s difficulties.


Year upon year of month upon month of anguish when another opportunity for conception had failed.
Striving, striving for a marriage in which two very imperfect people try not just to be good partners but to be good parents together.


Watching those we love live in ways we cannot control. Watching our hopes fade, and seasons change, and sometimes seasons of life go forever, while trying to remember and make sense of a God who gives us the desires of our heart.


I did not hold my Samuel the day he was born, and for his first nine months. This breaks my heart.  Now a new life, Jackson’s life, will burst into mine, and there will be 5 ½, maybe 6 years in his life story that I cannot go back through and write “Mama” on each page.


These are not the baby doll dreams from the cotton fields of my childhood. There is no warmth today, only weak winter sunlight, slanting in the window onto weathered hands as I type. But I am thankful, and I am excited.


I will have a 5 ½ year old son, not a baby in a soft blue blanket. What a privilege. I will look into those eyes, and teach him that it is safe and good to look back into mine. I will whisper “I love you“, “you are home” and “I’m your Mama".

And I think that which ever way it works with Psalm 37, I have received the desire of my heart.

Once again.