Our Stories

Already the homework has started.  Homework is especially challenging for my girls as these early assignments in high school seem to invariably involve the telling of their stories.   We all have multifaceted and layered life stories that often trigger single stories for others.  I have recently been deeply impacted by Chimamanda Adichie's TED talk about the danger of a single story in our lives.  For our children the label of foster child and adoption brings up many presuppositions of a single strand story that can be dangerous.  As my daughter wrote about her life yesterday, she started by writing that every cell in her body was resisting the writing of her story.  Recently she was at a summer camp where she was able to share many strands of her story in great detail for the first time.  She spoke to a small and caring work crew group who embraced her, prayed for her, and saw beyond any single strand in her story to accept the whole complex person she is now.  For now at school, she decided to write two stories.  One is for her teacher, including several strands of her life with details of her past.  The other emphasizes other superficial single strand parts of her life and will be the one she shares with the class who she does not know well or trust.

Conscious awareness and acknowledgement of the many strands and layers of our stories is an important part of growth for us all.  Coming to understand the reality of the many strands that influence us in the present can take many years and is an ongoing life process of self discovery in itself.  In the writing of several strands of her life my daughter stepped over some difficult hurdles that will bring ongoing healing and self understanding and acceptance.  It was important to walk beside her on this difficult road yesterday, helping her to integrate and accept all of who she is in her understanding of herself.

For all of us, it is important to continue to discover and remember the many strands of our stories.  Some strands are full of pain and shame.  Like my daughter, we will want to chose carefully who we share these with.  Still,  human relationship is central to our being.  Find someone who can help walk with you in the telling and acknowledging of all parts of your story.  There are parts of the stories of my children and husband that may not be helpful to share with me.  In some traditions people share these parts with their priests or wise healers.   Find those healers for you.  They may be counsellors, trusted friends or writing.  Discover the adventure of the diamonds and strong multistranded ropes within your own soul.   Uncover and embrace the fullness of your whole story.  Be careful of the safe tendency to create those safe single stories both in yourself and others.  They are dangerous in the end and rob us all of the immeasurable richness of all parts of what it means to be a human being.

One Step at a Time!

Gears shift and grind.  Labour Day brings reminders of the pain and joys and struggles of the birthing process that encompasses all new beginnings in life.

Life is full of ebbing and flowing, rest and activity, words and silence.  After a time of blogging silence, it is time for me to step forward again.

As in so many things, we need to just take one small step ahead at a time.  Sometimes it will feel that those steps only take us backward, but it is the showing up and attempting to take the steps that makes all the difference in the end.

A couple of my children started at a new and very large high school this week.  The anticipation of this new beginning has brought many fears and challenges over the last months.  Finally the day of actually going to a new school has come!  The general impression of my girls has been of love and kindness by those around them.  They have noticed angels of kindness in many ways this last week.  A schedule was changed quickly and easily.   Though a record of unnoticed overdue library books followed them to the new school and could have prevented them from getting their text books, forgiveness and mercy was extended and the textbooks were given.  A support aide drew close to one daughter again and again in several of her classes, giving support and friendly care and guidance.  Several teachers went over and above in their friendly love and care for the new individuals in their care.  One fellow student obviously was not able to sit still and caused disruption and challenge wherever he went, but my girls noticed the teachers extending love and care again and again.  They in turn felt accepted and understood by the care given to others.

Stepping forward to the new beginning of this September I am reminded again to go forward with the intention of goodness, love and mercy.  I am confident that even in my own stumbling efforts and uncertainties just one step at a time, that God's goodness and unfailing love will chase after me. (Psalm 23)  May we take those faltering small steps of kind words and love extended.  We may not see how they are noticed.  Be God's hands and feet of kindness and love and understanding forgiveness caring for others these days!  One step at a time.

Crazy Ways!

When love says go and we listen to the nudgings of our hearts from God, our ways often appear crazy.  Others shake their heads at our risky steps forward, and often we ourselves have our doubts about our choices too!  Don't be surprised that your ways may not always seem to make sense when you start to walk forward.  Even the apostle Paul says that God made foolish the wisdom of the world! (1 Corinthians 1:20).  God often calls people to follow Him without knowing clearly what is ahead.  I so often think of Abraham, who as an elderly man, headed off into the desert in faith and love for God.

These days I am excited for several of my friends who are taking "crazy" steps forward, trusting the still and quiet voice of their hearts and beings.  Although often we never really have complete assurance in our steps forward, I so respect my friends for taking the "road less taken" in their life journeys.  What an adventure to take those risks of the heart!  Yes, in those risky steps we are more open to disappointment and pain, but in the perspective of the whole of life, how wonderful to be open to living life fully and richly in faith and perseverance.

My friends, I am inspired by your  crazy steps forward in loving faith!  I am full of joy and hope as you take the high road, following your hearts in God.  My love and prayers are with you with much respect, standing with you in both the challenging and wonderful times ahead.  May you know God's tender love and care as you step out in faith.

Love Says Go!

This has been an exciting week for our oldest adult son, Jason.  He has just published his first book, called "Love Says Go."  I have not yet read it and am waiting in anticipation for it to arrive, but I have already been encouraged and challenged by the title.

Yes, I do want to be known for love.  As Jason challenges, true love gets out into the world and acts!  I do believe that God is love and that it is He who flows through the open channels of our beings to bring love to others.  We are all God's hands and feet of love in the world.  Those hands and feet start to love in the ordinary places of where we are now!

Sometimes that thought overwhelms me.  Where do I start to go with love?   First I have to be still and listen for those nudgings of God's Spirit.  Most often those are only tentative wonderings.  They are easy to miss and most often they seem insignificant.  Our life was changed that day I picked up the phone and called 1-877-ADOPT-07 to simply inquire about the process of local adoption.  A process was started.  Later I made another call to check if our daughters' foster sister might like to join us on our holiday.   Adoption was not on our mind for her, but that holiday began a process that lead to her being our daughter.  Usually the nudgings are less obvious and outwardly dramatic.  They may be an answer to an email or a kind word said in passing to a shop clerk.  They may be slowing down to ask a stranger about their day, or to remember a friend's birthday.  Today a friend from many years ago called just to say hello.  Love is most simply but most difficulty being patient and kind.  It is not a resounding gong that many notice.  It protects, trusts and hopes in perseverance.

It is not easy to go out and love.  Love starts in the quietness of our hearts and I believe that God gives us both the nudgings and the strength to go forward.  I know that I miss more opportunities to love than I take!  The great news is that there are always more chances tomorrow.  The opportunities to love are infinite.  Thanks Jason, for the encouragement.  Love says Go.

Identity

This long hot summer has been a special time for our four youngest daughters to connect and spend lazy hours together.  As they are almost all teens, I have been struck by their closeness in age.  This is the one and only summer that they will all be the same height.  They are at a crucial stage of their lives as they begin to accept and acknowledge their own identities.  In reality, though their days are spent in similar ways, their similarities stop there with their ages, heights and doings.

Each daughter is emerging in their own special ways.  I delight in the deep down radiating essence of each.  I wonder at what defines their very unique entities in a way that can be called their identity?  As a parent, I want to allow their heart true essence to emerge and be welcomed.  I am also aware of my place in helping them to unfold in healthy ways.

For each of the children, I take seriously our role as parents to offer choices of activities and interests and basic core values that will lead to their own development of their identities.  I do want all the children to learn to swim safely, so they do consistently take swimming lessons through the year, even if they are not passionate about swimming.  Each child has had some exposure to music lessons of one kind or another.  Most have chosen not to continue, but some have truly found that playing an instrument is a joy and part of their chosen identity.  All the girls have chosen to take dance lessons.  Again, some have continued and others have moved on to other areas of interest.  One daughter is passionate about cooking.  Another is an artist.  One son is most happy in the wilderness, hiking and climbing.  Another loves everything to do with psychology.  Some like to read and others do not.  Some are more social than others.  Those things are part of their delightfully emerging identities.  We have tried to offer the children and ourselves varied options of things that contribute to their identities and have also been available to encourage even attributes that are different from those offered but which come from within.

We are a multicultural family at our very core, as my husband is of Chinese descent and I am from British descent.  Our children also bring other cultures.  Each child differs in the impact that their cultural identity has for them.  One child has struggled with her perception, for example, of her Chinese heritage.  She has not embraced that.  Even within our genetic cultural beings, we have choice about the importance of that in our understanding of our own identity.  I feel a responsibility to offer our children coming from different cultures opportunities to learn and practice traditions inherent to their cultures, but in the end it will be their choice about how much that becomes a part of their identity.

My husband and I do love God and our identity as Christians is central to our being.  Though we have struggles with some of the cultural and specific outworkings of that identity even for ourselves,  the children do come with us to church and participate in our family times of prayer and activity, as imperfect as those sometimes are.  Some children may eventually chose to follow Christ themselves, while for others Christianity may not be a part of their faith identity.  I do know people who chose not to take their children to church or a faith community as they want them to freely determine their own identity.  In so many areas, we have chosen to go ahead in our own areas of interest and identity and offer our children wide ranging experiences so that they will eventually be choosing from places of understanding and experience.  In those areas that we do not have experience, we have seen that the desires and inclinations of identity often emerge from each of us regardless!

For much of my life I have struggled with my own identity and have been often caught in comparing myself to others.  Some external things that I have so desired to be a part of my identity have never happened.  I have been jealous of those for whom those desired things are a part of their identity.  I have struggled to have my true heart identity fit with what I might like it to be.  Sometimes it has felt that the reality of my identity is never quite what I would like.  I recognize that sometimes I have identified myself as a "human doing" rather than the "human being" that I am!  As the years have gone by,  I have noticed that when it comes to respecting the identities of others there are a few things that stand out for me.  Frequently I hardly notice the things that I have felt to be so centrally important in my own life.  When I chose my friends, for example, I often do not notice if they are married, if they have kids, if they are social with lots of friends, or what they are even doing for an occupation.  What I do notice are the qualities and essence of their being.  I notice those fruits of the spirit.  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control and gentleness.  Most important of those is love.   Those are not qualities that I would immediately think were qualities of identity, but certainly these days I am struck increasingly by their important and most central impact.  They are qualities that are expressed in uniquely different ways by each of us.  I value and delight in those different ways, but when all is said and done, I do hope that those core qualities available to us all will be what shines forth most in me as my identity.  May I mostly be a person of love, undergirding and covering all things. Certainly that is what I notice first in others.

Special Gifts

There are gifts to be had in almost every life situation.  Although I deeply wish that my youngest girls could have avoided the turmoil and trauma of their early years, somehow they have become who they are today through all of their life experiences.  I want to embrace all of who they are and help them turn those stumbling blocks of their earlier years into stepping stones to deeper and richer understandings and life today.  We all have no alternative but to go forward, using all of our life for good now and in the future.

One of the gifts of spending many years in a full foster home with many babies is that our girls have had lots of exposure to different children and have learned how to care for babies.  Our three youngest spent the last two days with their foster family, helping to care for their younger kids to try to give their foster parents a couple of days of relative rest.  The girls are gifted in caring for little kids and relating to them.  They learned amazing skills of baby care and compassion from the years spent with their very wonderful foster mom.  For a couple of days they have helped play with an assortment of younger children, spending hours outside and watching out for their younger foster siblings.  It was a win-win situation.  The younger kids had a wonderful few days of play, our children got to learn responsibility and also lots of fun play too, and their foster parents had a bit of a break as all the kids entertained one another!  The girls are growing in compassion and understanding for other children as well.  They have known so many other children from situations like their own which has helped them reflect and process some of their own challenging feelings.

Spending time with their foster family brings a multitude of emotions back to our kids.  We will have lots of processing time and long hugs in the next few days.  There will be subtle dysregulation that  I know is from the emotions emerging from this time.  We will talk and process and hug with constant reassurance of our love.  This time away was a part of the children fully living life with people who we all love and respect.   Together, we will help them to not fear the mixed emotions that emerge, always using the challenges for those positive areas of growth and deeper understanding of themselves and others.

The Village

It does take a village to raise a child!  In our often isolated culture where everyone is working long hours to make ends meet it is often difficult to connect with others who will have the time and desire to get to know us and our children.  I have always wanted to make connections with others, but have felt insecure building those important relationships.  In the midst of my own full life, those connections have sometimes seemed to me to be impossible.  I have prayed for significant relationships for myself and my children.  Over the years I have been delightfully surprised in the answers to those rather unbelieving prayers. People have approached me and wanted to get to know our kids.  Sometimes the children make their own connections with wonderful people who then become family friends.  Our girls have spent several days this summer with an incredible woman who initially met them in the Sunday School at our very large church. Somehow she never really connected with me until several months after beginning a relationship with the girls.  She has now become a close friend and significant support for us all.  I am delighting that my children have brought me a new friend!  In turn, I know that the girls have been a blessing to her.  She has always wanted a daughter and sees the answer to her own prayers in our girls.  They love her and delight in her care for them.  She sees beyond some of their behaviours to their kind hearts within.  Even before knowing me well, she took some time off work and asked me if she could take the girls on some day trips.  Thank you, my friend, for offering your loving and caring self to us all as a most wonderful gift.

Part of my own journey has been about balancing both the giving and receiving in life.  I have always felt that it is more important to give than to receive, and have stubbornly blasted ahead determined to give as much as I can.  In attempting to give, I never had time to see the offerings of the gifts of others. I ignored the gift of receiving and did not cultivate that important skill of receptivity and humility.  To be always the giver can, at its extreme, be a place of arrogant control.  At times I have taken on the position of  what a friend calls,"CEO of the universe."  I still want to be a giver, but also want to sit back and let God be God, being receptive and observant to the many gifts that others offer.  Those gifts come in varied and unique packages, sometimes almost like the trick wrapping that so delights my kids.   I am learning to delight in the receiving from many places, including from our children and those others who are those we are attempting to give to.  Sometimes, in fact, the giving is richer for the receiving.

Connections of all sorts in the village of our lives.  We all so need and desire those connections, but do not always notice and receive their gift.  I get concerned that my children have a meaningful and supportive village in the future, but I want to increasingly trust in the goodness and care of God and others.  Thank you to so many friends for the miracles of connection in both giving and receiving in love and gentleness.  For all of us, may we be still.  Receive and feel the warm sun on your face, like those many gifts given each day.