The First Time (A Brief Summary of the Decision to Adopt)

The first time.  So much desperate anger.  So much desperate pain.  Desperate desperation.  It took a long, long time for all that desperate desolation inside ourselves to be shot through with tiny, burning rays of hope.  For the murkiness of blinding confusion to clear just enough.  Enough to see a different plan, a different path, a different dream searing its way into existence.  Outside of our own wants and the things we had decided (without much authority to do so I might add) we would have.  We WOULD have and no one would tell us differently.  Until they did.  Tell us all we wouldn't have.  Then we couldn't fight it.  In rushed horror and hurt and grief and even though we felt blindsided...blinded... we at least saw how very very little say we have over anything.  How almost laughable is the arrogance of authority.  But we saw it from a place far outside of ourselves.  Still within, we were screaming, sobbing, pounding bruised fists on hard wooden table tops and dying.  Still within there rushed a tidal wave of unchecked devastation.

Then the different path presented itself.  We watched details unfold themselves.  Watched, hesitant, unsure, almost shy as a brilliant newness sprung to life in our thoughts.  Brought hands up to our eyes, roughly pushed tears away.  Somewhere in a different place bombs were still exploding.  But no longer was it right before our eyes.

Then as if a miracle had occurred, blackness stopped seeping its way into our hearts and lives and a sure and steady strength reached down and grabbed us hard by our bruised hearts and pulled us upright again.  We could finally stand up straight and look ahead and believe that hope existed.

Somewhere far away, eight months before the end of an unspeakably terrible war that took 100 000 lives, a little boy was conceived.  Amid the chaos and confusion of a suffering country, one life, the life that would come to mean everything to us, began.

And so, beauty in the form of a little boy full of spirit and joy came to us from a most unlikely place.

And so for us, our burden of pain became a burden of love, and beauty leaped up, fiery and alive, from the ashes of what appeared to be the destruction of our hopes and dreams.  It took a long time to understand that destruction was the only way to bring forth newness and growth.