Wrangler Dani

On Friday, we had our home study visit. Honestly, despite all the nerves, it was wonderful. Our social worker was joyful, thoughtful and we liked her immediately. Our home was cleaned to perfection (can you say motivation!?) and even Guinness the Puppy behaved herself.

We have to complete a few more pieces of paperwork, and then our part is DONE! After so long of thinking and hoping and waiting and wondering, it’s a really good feeling to be so close. Now, since I’m so old and wise and experienced (haha) I want to offer some encouragement to anyone else on the cusp of a Big Life Thing. Say yes. Say yes once, and say it again.

When we started toward adopting, we had to say yes to a lot of things. I’m sure there will be more, but if we’d listened to fear and pessimism, we would never have even gotten started – that first yes would have stayed inside of us, trapped indefinitely.

I think that we, as a culture, have made commitment – the continuous yes – into a boogeyman. We want the cute girl on the beach with the handsome guy on one knee to say “yes”, but then we don’t much care if she still says yes in a year or two (The Bachelor, anyone?). Marriage conferences and books talk a lot about the difficulties of lifelong commitment and very little about the joy of being secure in a relationship with someone who knows you better then you know yourself; they extol the joy of engagement (the first yes) and shake their heads sadly over future yesses, dooming us all to seeming unhappiness. We talk about kids (biological or adopted) as little more than eating, breathing challenges, who keep us from having adult friends and a good night’s sleep. Isn’t it funny that the very things that make us fly into tizzies of Facebook joy cause us to sigh in exhaustion and annoyance in real life? We warn our friends of how tough marriage is and how tired we are from our kids, and then we’re over-the-moon thrilled when they announce engagements and pregnancies? That’s weird, right? Is it any wonder that we have a confused, dour culture that is constantly in search of the Next Big Thing instead of one that relishes the everyday joys and beauties of an imperfect but faithful life? We shriek with happiness when someone gets engaged and sigh with boredom over another night at home with our husband and some pork chops – when did we get so cynical? When did the first yes become the only yes we notice?

I struggled over writing about our adoption process because I feared the nay-sayers. I feared the boredom, the cynicism, the been-there-done-that sighs. I wanted to shout for joy and I feared that I would be shouted down by a culture that only sees joy in the big, Instagram-filtered moments and not in the countless small, quiet, faithful ones – a culture that loves yes in tropical climates when cameras are rolling and feels shackled by yes when days get shorter, nights are colder and relationship is harder. Of course, there are mountains yet to be climbed on this adoption trek. We are suited up and we are under no illusions that this is a hike for the faint of heart. But gosh if we aren’t blessed to see these views, glory in the God who made them and be grateful for the strength to keep walking.

Thanks for reading and sharing in our joy. Thank you for being a subset of culture, one that believes in continuous yes. There’s no way for me to tell you how much the encouragement of your prayers, support, calls, texts and love has meant to us over the last couple of weeks, and I am so grateful.

Today, I’m saying yes again and again. Yes to hope, to faithfulness, to obedience. Yes to waiting and dreaming. Yes to dirty clothes and chilly nights. Yes to hugs and kisses and a family that is on the brink of another, bigger yes.