Excalibur

I have been spending my evenings with my Excalibur.   Somehow the idea of Excalibur brings a romantic Disneyish feel.  The original Excalibur was King Arthur's sword.  The name means hard battle. Often I am embroiled in hard battles and need a sword of truth to help me cut through.  That is true, but I digress.

My Excalibur here is not a sword.  It is a dehydrator.  It was my first ever purchase through the computor.  I knew we would be doing lots of fruit drying and I wanted a dryer that was strong and effective with lots of space.  Excalibur is all that and more.  It does a great job, transforming our bitter apples that were picked before they were sweet enough for the bears.  Their sharp mouth scrunching bitterness is transformed by hours of heat  into sweet and chewy apple rings.

There is lots of tedious work for me before the apples are ready for Excalibur.  The apples need to be washed, cored and sliced.  There are nine trays, so I count them by threes as I load them up.  I put the larger pieces on the corners and outside edges, lining up the little bits protected in the middle.  It takes about fourteen hours of forced air heat circulating through the trays to dry the apples.  I turn Excalibur on at night and wake up to a sweet and warm appley smell wafting through the house.  The dried apple slices are delicious and a favourite for the kids to take for their lunches and to share with their friends.  Somehow much more tasty and user friendly for school than regular apples.

Sometimes I feel like those apples.  There are areas of tart bitterness in me.   Life often brings circumstances that seem like drying heat in my life.   Life's challenges leave me feeling somewhat shrivelled inside.  I pray that these times of  unwanted heat will only help me to be sweeter, softer and more tender.  The truth is, my own bitterness is not as easily transformed as the apples in Excalibur.  I do have choice about what I do with the challenges and with the bitterness.  I can chose to seek to be increasingly tender, loving and gentle through the hard times.

It is the same with our children.  We cannot protect them from all the challenges and hard places in life.  Sometimes these hard things do bring out wonderful qualities in our children.  An Iranian friend who has known much suffering tells me, with tears in her eyes, that our kids  need some suffering in their lives to help bring out their strengths.  The butterfly struggling to emerge from the cocoon strengthens his wings in the process.  He does not live if we cut the cocoon open for him.  Each time we have adopted, I have seen amazing qualities in each of my children that have been brought out through their suffering.  We always hear so much about the pain and difficult qualities in our kids by adoption.  Look carefully for those amazing qualities standing with the others.  I  pray that my children would not loose those delightful qualities as they come into our home where life will be in some ways easier.  I do not want them to feel that their essential being must somehow change as they come into the fold of our family.   May our love and family support only strengthen the  good qualities that were brought out through the suffering and the previous good in their lives.  Do not try to protect your children from all the challenges of life.  Help reframe the challenging times in their lives as part of their amazing life story that has helped to shape them into the wonderful people that they are now.  Pray with them that the heat in their lives will only help transform their bitterness.  Support them through their challenges and give them hope that it is through the hard times that they will grow and become more and more the people they are meant to be, full of strength, perserverance, tender love and gentleness.