Entering In

First off...this post comes out of a lot of things God has been doing in my heart. Funny enough, he has been working on me through some blogs I have been reading. As I have followed along with sweet Ruby Grace's story here, God has really softened my heart to the needs, physical and emotional, our kids will have when they get here.
      (Quick paraphrase of her story: her parents have adopted 13 kids or more and she was 6lbs when they met her in an   orphanage and almost a year old. They adopted her and brought her home and thought she had hydrocephalous. Once they got her checked she had 12 cysts in her brain (doctor had never seen more than a kid with 2 in their brain) that needed draining with multiple brain surgeries. After the first surgery they discovered she is blind. She has had close death calls and still pulling through surgery by surgery. They have moved their lives and left their ministry to move to be close to the best children's hospital for her)

I have gone from being somewhat "scared" of these needs, to really honored to meet these needs with the best of our abilities. Then, I read two posts from a family who adopted Miles from the same city in Congo that we are adopting from, over a year ago. I was reading this certain post she put up this week about a minor corrective surgery he went through, then I clicked into the link from an older post about trauma and triggers. As I read her very vulnerable and powerful description of this account of his trauma shortly after bringing him home, God really spoke to my heart in a strange way.  I read that terrible experience and felt no fear but actually felt this weird......

excitement....

Really God?

Now, I was not excited my kids would go through this or have been through such trauma that would lead them to banging their heads against the cabinet to get food. No. That broke my heart as did several other parts.
But, I was excited to be a part as God re-wrote their story from trauma to unconditional love. That trauma will always be there as a part of their story, but soon it will be the history of their story instead of the current.  I am privileged to be a small part of their healing. I am excited to embrace a child that may not trust my embrace yet. I am honored to tell those children each meal that this will not be their last, that I will always feed them and clothe them. I am excited to tuck them in to a bed and say yes, this is your forever home, forever siblings, and forever family.

I was reminded of James 1:27.
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

In...their...distress.

Yes... we will gladly enter in.

In their distress. God is calling me sweetly to THAT place. And he is making me strangely and unexplainably excited to go to that hard place.