Birthdays and Adoption

Seemingly everything these days is colored by our wait for Jackson. In February, we celebrated Valentine’s Day, his grandfather’s birthday, and most recently, his big brother Sam’s eighth birthday. All were lovely days, happily celebrated, yet someone was missing…




(Yes, we have updated pictures!)


Jackson, I wonder if you will ever grasp how quickly you were knit to our hearts, how quickly your new family felt your absence? I wonder if you will one day read this and grin at the thought that while you were going to kindergarten in Pindgingshan, we were missing you, even as we were slaying a dragon birthday cake and envisioning your tongue turning frosting-green along with ours?

What were your first five birthdays like? Will you be home by your sixth? A mama can hope, can’t she?

Jackson, you are missed! We cannot wait for you to come home!

Birthdays are special! These special days, and all the holidays, and summer vacations, and the day to day life that American families so joyfully celebrate in homes all across our country are unknown to many children. I wonder if there are a lot of families like ours used to be, unaware of all the children who wait. Not just in China, but here in the States, and in Russia, and in Haiti, and in Africa, and on and on…..

Today, in honor of all the little ones who don’t have a family to celebrate their birthday with them yet, I am praying for families to feel the call to adoption. Will you pray with me? I have added several links that will connect you with the real faces of waiting children in China. Please take a moment and see who is waiting… maybe for you…

Meet Gretchen here...

Or Dalton here...

Find Felix here...

Or Wendy here...

Care Package

The frenzy has ceased. The days of activity to drive forward a blizzard of paperwork, sent around the world to secure a child, have stopped. All the documents that ordain what we hope the Lord has already decreed are now in their rightful place.


In America, government employees will sift through our most personal moments as a family as they read our home study, then validate birth certificates and marriage license, and do their best to protect both a little child and a large nation. Will they find us, once again, suitable parents for a foreign orphan?


In China, equally serious government employees will begin to match the paperwork of an orphaned little boy with that of a family who has a child-sized hole in its heart. They too, will read, in their beautiful Chinese language, the translated story of our family ~ our hopes and dreams, our failures. And they will do their best for their native son.


Our paperwork is now up to date. All that we can do, as the panic-attack provoking stacks of documents find sanctuary in their rightful homes, far from our dining room table, is wait.


The day our last document was sent, we put a care package in the mail to Jackson. How terribly strange. Nothing says loving like…we were at a loss. Can any of it make sense to a precious child whose world is upside down? Can he look at our pictures, painstakingly labeled with the Chinese words for Mama, Daddy, Big Sister, Big Brother, and not feel fear? What must he think? Can he know that those photographs represent safety and love and home? That laughter fills our hearts, not just our “picture faces”? That our home is filled with joy, and books, and toys, and warm meals, and cool drinks, and security?

How do you say “We love you” in a box? Will he get to snuggle under that warm blanket? Will he get to wrap his little fingers around those cars and whiz them with glee down a clean stretch of floor somewhere on the other side of the earth?

Can he know the love his sister felt when she chose that bear? Will the other children treat him better or worse for the knowledge that someone is coming for him? Will he be better cared for by the orphanage nannies because he is going “home”? Will those Twix bars buy him favor? You do what you must.

One day we will tell him.  We will tell him how much we fussed over those gifts, and prayed that somehow they would say “We love you”.

We will tell him about the faithful Ruth in China, whom we have never met, yet who was willing to translate our letter for us, because she is a believer and because she works with believers who are pouring out their lives as a drink offering to care for “the least of these” in Pingdingshan. We will tell him that every hope for him, every prayer for him, every ache to hold him and make things right were sealed up in that box. Sent to him across the planet. Because even though we can’t get to him, that box can. And it can carry to him all the love that we cannot take him.

Yet.

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.