"Sitting in the coffee shop not even a full day before I would become permanently and irrevocably a father, it was easy not to believe it was really happening. Nothing had changed at all in my life in preparation. My schedule was the same, my wife looked no different. Maybe that’s why I felt so sickeningly scared the first morning after we got Yosi. The enormity of what we had been striving for and had been granted was more than I had prepared myself for. It is its own type of birth pain."
~from Adoption Week Narrative #1: Preparing to Travel, or “Get Your American Butts to Guatemala, Pronto!”, September, 2010
"If it’s hard to think of what to do with your final two childless hours, your last thirty minutes are like choosing your last meal, or standing in the back of the church before the wedding march begins."
~ from "Adoption Week Narrative #2: The Longest 2 Hours Ever", September, 2010
"It is a blur now as I think back on it. It was neither more nor less than we were expecting. It was imprinting itself on our minds as a fresh reality, a singular and true event."
~ from "Adoption Week Narrative #5: A Peaceful Shore", September, 2010
"October brings with it every year a cold that forces us inside, closer to those we can drift from in the expansive warmth of the earlier months. If summer is the tide that pushes us high onto sand we’ve never known, fall is the ebb that pulls us back where we belong. We sat in the car and I was sure of God, as a few miles away my daughter learned things about Him it seems I can believe on any day but Sunday anymore."
~ from "Interstitial", October, 2010
"I walk to the post office from my job every morning. It is only three blocks, but I cherish this ten minutes of my day. It is holy sanctuary, this cracked sidewalk. During the years I couldn’t come to peace with God I prayed, daily as I walked, the only prayer that was true from my heart, a weak and bitter liturgy. 'God, I believe you are God. I believe you are good, though I don’t know how. Help me to see how.' "
~ from "Ocean", November, 2010
"Lyndie and I have long held that children and teens best learn how to be mature adults by watching mature adults doing adult things. Learning happens at the hazy perimeter of understanding, and if we aren’t stretched, we don’t grow."
~ from "Snow Angel", December, 2010
"I refuse to present my daughter with an algebraic equation of how God works, because I haven’t been able to solve for x in that equation myself for years. I want her to know that God loves her, that He loves everyone who ever has been or will be born. I want her to know that God wants a relationship with her, that He wants her to love Him and to love others because she loves Him and He loves her. I want her to live life with gusto because the Spirit that is that Love fills her lungs and makes her laugh till she cries. I want her to know God, regardless of what else she doesn’t, what else we can’t. Isn’t that Christianity?"
~ from "I Don't Know and Other Heresies", March, 2011
“Doing that means I have to be honest when certain questions the Bible raises don’t have answers, and certain stories it tells don’t have positive messages, and certain pictures it paints of God are less than glorious. I don’t know what to do with those parts, but I’m not allowed to make up answers to soften the blow. When there is no good answer I will have to tell her so, and hold her hand through it, and all the while pray that the God who eschewed the violence of fire and cyclone for a whisper will tell her He is love, and that He too longs for the day when the foggy glass is removed and we see Him as He is.” ~ from "What we owe our kids when we talk about the Bible part 5, May, 2011
please tell me the running water was there before you sat down
The running water was probably from the neighbor washing his car (every Saturday whether it needed it or not!)
But you were so cute!
There is an undeniable adorableness. And, since Mama is being kind, I’d like to point out that this is the age where we’re all lucky you’re actually WEARING the dirty underwear instead of tossing them off and streaking through the mud puddle … and yard, and apple orchard, and road, and neighbor’s yard. There was one summer where I felt like every other day some kid was yelling, “Shaaaann!!! YOUR BROTHER’S DOING IT AGAIN!”
Oh sure, bring that up. It’s been SEVERAL years since the last time that happened.
Aren’t we all glad that he outgrew that stage?!
this…is hilarious.