reflections on a year past

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

Deuteronomy 8:2

A year ago, on the last day of 2007, we had only a vague idea of what the year ahead held for us. We knew we would have to move back to Singapore. Our sabbatical in Claremont would draw to an end. We would be back in real life! K would have to go back to work, and the kids to a new preschool.

But God has also taken us down roads unexpected, where we experienced fear, worry, anxiousness, but also God's joy, peace and love.

This year, Noah came home to us. As we worked this out, we have felt God prodding us along. We have felt God working it out for us - it was just little over six months from the point when we definitely decided that we were going to adopt to when Noah came home. We have felt God challenge us to keep believing His plan for us, when we learned of Noah's health issues. We have felt God's love and blessing as Noah settled into our family, and as we adjusted to being a family of five.

K and I continue to learn about God's father heart for us - how He loves, cares and comforts us, just as we do our children. As Josh and Emma grow up, we have felt challenged to become better parents, wiser parents, and have felt keenly our need for God's wisdom. They ask hard questions sometimes!

In our move back home, we have felt loss. It was harder than I had expected to give up all that we had been blessed with in Claremont. It was harder than I had expected to settle into our life back home. But even in this time of transition, I have felt God challenge us to keep to the course that He has planned for us. It would be easy to wander off, to seek something else because I think it is better, easier. But what blessings, what lessons would we be giving up then?

So here, now, this is what I know. God has been real in our lives. He has been faithful. He has blessed. And even in the hard things, we have been taught to trust that God is there, that He knows it all, that His hand is on us, and that His hand guides us.

sitting on a rocking chair

Noah is 8 months old today. He has been home with us for almost 4 months. We are waiting for the court proceedings to be done, so that he is legally ours. He feels like ours already.

We have hardly thought about it: it was just a matter of letting our lawyers work out the process.

Then yesterday the ground start to shake again.

We came across information in the newspapers that could potentially hold things up. In the worst case scenario, I thought it could hamper, even bring to a grinding halt, our legal adoption.

In the couple of hours we had to wait before we could get a hold of our lawyers, I worried, fretted, and threw the equivalent of a four-year-old's tantrum in my conversation with God. (I see a four-year-old's tantrum with more regularity than I would like, so I have a pretty good idea of what it looks like.)

Why did we come so far, if it was not going to work out? Why now, when we were so close to being done with everything? Why now, after we've had so much time with him? And if it didn't work out, how was I supposed to explain everything to the two older kids??

Those couple of hours were plenty of time for me to get scared. To feel fearful. To feel how shaky the ground was.

K finally managed to speak to our lawyers, and we were basically told that our legal adoption should not be held up at all. We continue to pray that this will not change.

When K called me to report what the lawyer had told him, I was in the middle of doing my bible study homework. After we hung up, I went back to it. This was what I went back to...

Sing, O Daughter of Zion;
shout aloud, O Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart,
O Daughter of Jerusalem!
The LORD has taken away your punishment,
he has turned back your enemy.
The LORD, the King of Israel, is with you;
never again will you fear any harm.
On that day they will say to Jerusalem,
"Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands hang limp.
The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.

Zephaniah 3:14-17

The last verse has always been one of my favourites. But today, God showed me something else, something more. That last verse follows God's assurance that he is keeping me, us, safe: "Do not fear, do not let your hands go limp".

This is what Beth Moore writes: These verses beautifully illustrate that blessed moment in which God's throne becomes a rocking chair and He pulls His fretting, fearful child into His arms and says, "It's ok, I'm right here."

How those words leapt off the page.

How many times have I done this with my children: pull them to me, cuddle them, comfort them, so that in my embrace they go limp with relief.

God didn't tell us how it was all going to work out for us, for Noah, if we would have any trouble with the legal process. We still don't know; we are waiting it out.

But He did pull me into His rocking chair and quiet me with His love.

I am limp with relief.

funny faces