I’m currently in a mental battle that has been going on for the better part of a year. “How unconditional should love really be?” Or maybe the better question, “Does unconditional love equal unconditional relationship on the other person’s terms?” I’m hoping not. What if that person is a child of yours? Still hoping not....
So after this post, a thoughtful reader asked for what I thought I did right in our adoption journey. It was a hard question; I’m my own best (or worst) critic…depending on how you look at it. In my insecurity and looking for objectiveness, I turned to social media. I’m glad did. The comments were...
For various reasons, the three older kids are not living at home. One wants to return, the other two are desperately trying to find their wings so that they can fly the nest for good. With more mental margin than I’ve had in years, I’ve been reflecting over our experience of adopting older kids and...
For those of you who don’t know us in real life…or have entered our lives more recently…I sat down to write out a blog-length version of our adoption story recently. I had agreed to it months ago. It was challenging writing it without the narrative being completely colored by where we currently are in our journey....
I wanted to publish a post like this on Monday (Airplane Day for John and Kayla), but I was had been waiting all night in the ER for psych bed for one of the other kids. That’s a story for another post, but you can keep our family in your prayers. This has been a long...
The end of our pastor’s sermon yesterday really challenged me. You can listen to it here. It’s the one based on Matt 11:25-30. Start at time marker 21:45. It was about reconciliation. He talked about how reconciliation comes at cost. The cost is great (especially to our pride) but we can choose to focus on what...
I get a lot of questions about how our adoption of Ty affected our bio kids. Or how our out-of-birth order adoption of three unrelated teen/tweens affected the kids who were already at home. The human part of me is telling you it sucks and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Jesus is whispering that...
When individuals spend copious amounts of time feeling insecure, they start learning to protect themselves at all cost. Their brain is constantly in hyper-alert mode which causes it to stop developing. Many people get stuck in the stage of development that is eg0-centric–literally incapable of thinking about how things may impact someone else. As Dr. Bruce Perry...