Cause maybe someone else needed this today

So, I'm doing my BSF homework, which is a little bit of a miracle in and of itself. I did it this morning, after treating myself to a Starbucks, because I had a sneaking suspicion that the sense of frenzy that I have been feeling for the entire month of October and the raging fight that Walker and I had last night could, just maybe, be completely correlated to the dust accumulating on my bible.

And the resulting dust accumulating on my soul.

We are studying Isaiah 9 and the homework question asked us to explain in our own words the meanings of the names given for Christ in Isaiah 9:6: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Some big names going on there.

I fixated on Prince of Peace and answered the question by listing what the Prince of Peace is not.


The Lord is not:

the prince of discord
the prince of anxiety
the prince of confusion
the prince of chaos
the prince of despair
the prince of fear
the prince of worry
the prince of bitterness

All of those things have been hanging over us lately. So I have to wonder, just which prince are we allowing to reign over us?

Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.  Philippians 4:6-7 (The Message)

Last night, I painted my husband's fingernails and put on his eyeliner

It was a first, but it was for a good cause.

Meet the Osbournes!

It was my friend Jill Ann's "Party Like a Rock Star" birthday party.

And I was a little bit scared of how much I enjoyed doing my makeup like Sharon Osbourne.

Wanna hear something sad? Shanna, this girl

is my Most Fashionable Friend. She's just wearing jeans here because she had literally been at a barn all day. But even in jeans and a tank top, she always looks fantastic from head to toe.  Shanna did my hair and makeup for my wedding and even dressed me for each of my showers!

She was my personal Rachel Zoe.

It is always sad to wake up the next morning after being Shannatized when you look in the mirror and you're back to your old frumpy self.

My friends and I joke that when we are shopping we often think, WWSD? - what would Shanna do? - to help us make purchasing decisions. I am not a makeup person but I have discovered The Secret to looking good at age 40. Y'all ready? Listen real close:

The secret to looking good at 40 is...LOTS of makeup.

So I've been trying very hard to learn how to apply with a concentration on my eyes. I've bought more eyeshadows and liners in the past year than I have since middle school. I've even watched YouTubes on how to apply it! (Yes, there are YouTubes.)

The past several times I have seen Shanna out, I have been giddy with anticipation, waiting for her to say, "Oooo, Missy! You did good on your eyes, girl!"

I've batted my eyes.

I got nothing.

For this costume party, I wore more black and smokey gray eyeshadow on my eyes than I ever have before. Just caked it on. Then when I thought I had too much, I put on more. Then I lined the outsides and insides of my eyes in black which I haven't done since 1980-something.

So, last night, as soon as Shanna saw me in costume, what did she say? 

"Oooooo! I like your eye makeup, Mis! I'm so proud of you!"

Imagine my very, very made up eyes rolling.

I think she liked Walker's eyes too.

Speaking of my wedding. Last night one of the songs that came on was Baby Got Back. Shanna told me that, much to her shock, they played that song at our wedding! So now everytime she hears I like big butts and I cannot lie it reminds her of my and Walker's wedding. Touching, huh?

What can you expect from the Osbournes.

We're having problems with boredom in the bedroom

No, not that kind.

The decorating kind.

You know how the master bedroom is usually the last room in the house to get decorated - that is definitely true around here.

I was asking friends and tweeting etc etc when it occurred to me that I have a blog that is read by a few gifted women (And one or two straight guys whom I don't expect to be much help.) So I did a little video of the problem at hand.

(I also did a video recently on just how dirty my house was but I have yet to post it. It's my ministry, y'all. To make you feel better about your own selves via comparison. You're welcome.)

Our bedroom is just blah. It is fairly small and has so much furniture, it looks very crowded. And the walls are BLANK and if you could see the rest of my house, you would know that I consider blank walls to be an abomination of desolation. Yet, poor little bedroom is nekked.

Here, just watch. And then lay it on me.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

See what I mean? So boring it could put you to...sleep.

If y'all have any good inspiration links, bring em. I have not had much luck searching the interwebs for fantastic pale green small bedrooms with tons of deco furniture to emulate.


Thanks!!!

*** Y'all, I have not had time to ponder your comments because we had a garage sale today (exhausted) but re moving the bed under the window - I did that once. It did make the room look bigger but I just felt it looked weird to have curtains behind the bed, you know? Thoughts? 

And I was the one who wasn't gonna let my kids play with war toys

The boy is obSESSED

with all things military.

Fire in the hole!!!

 

Cleaning his weapon. In front of his own baby picture.

Which do you think makes him more intimidating? 

The silly bands, 

 

the duct taped machine gun,

 

 or the box of Huggies in the background?

Scary spooky month

October kicks my pumpkin every year. Frightfully busy. At least this year I was prepared for it - last year I just stayed moaning in a fetal position for 31 days and was a witch to everyone. This year I have said HALL-OWEEN NO to almost everything that was asked of me by anyone I did not birth (or birth with) - that has helped.

As much as I wanted to carry those puns forward, I'm just too tired. I know you're relieved.

Although I do believe "kicks my pumpkin" is a keeper.

"What he needs is a good pumpkin-kickin'." 
BAHAHA!
I do so amuse myself.

Anyway.

As soon my eyes quit twitching and the 18 laundry baskets full of whoknowswhatall are emptied I shall finish my adoption conference update but until then, I want to share a cartoon my friend Lyla sent me today, which hit way, way too close to home. Rather, my second home, which is currently parked in my driveway fermenting who knows what:

Isaiah's story

This minidoc, which took place in Houston, was shown at the conference.


Isaiah's Story from 31Films on Vimeo.

Also, Karyn Purvis was on Family Life Today back in March - you can listen to it here.

Together for Adoption Conference - Karyn Purvis is a Rock Star

I have a couple of friends who have adopted older children. When I said that I was going to hear Karyn Purvis speak, both of them got dreamy, jealous looks on their faces. "She's so amazing," they both said. "She helped our family more than anyone in the world." I could not wait to see what the big deal was.

I saw. Within five minutes of listening to this soothing, gentle, emotional, brilliant woman, I wanted to be her when I grew up. You know the Dog Whisperer, the Horse Whisperer - Karyn is the Hurt Child Whisperer.

And I thought so many times, I am so glad that she is on our team. As in, a woman who is so dedicated to using her PhD in psychology and what she has learned about the science of the brain to help little ones to the glory of God. As she said, everything we've learned about brain science is completely outlined in the Bible.

Karyn works at the Institute for Child Development at Texas Christian University. There is a webinar online right now about how to parent children from Haiti and other "hard places." You can access it here. If you have adopted an older child, you must learn from her. If you have adopted a younger child, you must hear from her. If you are a parent, you must hear her. Because as I listened, I wasn't even thinking about our future Bethie baby - I was just thinking about how I wanted to go home and implement the things I learned with the kiddos that I have now.

Karyn has written a book called The Connected Child and on the website Empowered to Connect there are a ton of resources, including videos you can download, and there is even a bible study that can be downloaded and printed.


I am just going to give you some of the highlights and quotes that jumped out at me during her talks:

• We are designed for connection. We are designed to know God in each other.
• You could have parented 15 biological children, but adopting a child who has come from a hard place is going to mean you are starting over at ground zero.
• Relationship is primary. If we are fixed on a strategy instead of a relationship we will fail the child. (that one stung)
• Women naturally cradle their babies on the left (this definitely is true of me) - those who are depressed cradle on the right. Why? Because love/bonding/connection is a right brained activity. Wow, huh? 
• You can tell immediately how a mother will attach to her child: mothers who will use their entire palm to caress their newborn's face and body; depressed/disattached mothers use only their fingertips
• The most tender-hearted children, if not cherished in early childhood, will become the most aggressive.
• Children who are in perpetual fight or flight mode from an unsafe childhood cannot learn. They are too busy just surviving, so learning delays are almost certain. This made me visualize myself in the middle of a circle of people yielding knives pointed at me. If I felt a poke, I would immediately jump. The same is true of children who came from a traumatic background. Even after being placed in a safe home, the fight or flight instinct remains. The slightest 'poke' can cause them to fall apart and seemingly over-react. The good news is - they CAN be retrained. Karyn said over and over she has never seen a child so traumatized and difficult that cannot make tremendous, tremendous strides. And this woman has worked with the type of kids who have committed murder. 
• Sad and scared children look crazy. Sad and scared children look angry. 
• Children who come from hard places do not have an understanding of time. They think: my past was bad, my future will be bad, all I have is now and if my immediate needs are not met, I will die. So saying, "you can't go swimming now, we will go this afternoon" can lead to a nuclear meltdown. Many breakdowns may occur throughout the day, and many of them will be violent.
• Trust is built on consistent yeses for the newborn. Newborns get told yes I'll hold you, yes I'll feed you, etc all day long. Around two years old we begin to tell them no, but they can handle it because of all the yeses they received from us in their infancy. Children from hard places missed out on all that, and it led to their brains not developing properly (when you feed your baby at 3am, you are doing some serious positive psychological and physiological work. Fascinating, huh?) So when dealing with the older child who was deprived of a secure infancy, the infancy stage must be recreated. She tries to give a child seven yeses for each no in order to gain trust. This takes much creativity! And it is why she is called the bubble gum lady. Children in her clinics get lots and lots of bubble gum! This also involves rocking them and looking into their eyes, just like a baby, and feeding them every two hours. This causes their brains to develop differently. All that loving we do on a baby - it is more than just bonding, it has a neurological effect on them. (See why I was so blown away?)
• 36 months is the optimal age for attachment. She did not elaborate on this, but I think it explains why Ike resides in a condo wrapped around my little finger at the moment.
• Regarding foster care: there is nothing sadder than a foster mother who is only doing it for the money (as a former CASA worker, I can attest to this fact. The sad, loveless foster homes I visited are what made me determined to be a foster mom someday.) And Karyn claimed that half of the children she has served in the past eleven years were abused in their foster home. Can you imagine the horror of being removed from an abusive home and put right back into another one? What does that do to a child?? CHRISTIANS!! STEP UP!!! (more on that later.)

She also told a true story about some little barn swallows that had built a nest on her front porch, and how her grandchildren and she took great delight in watching them make their nests and raise their babies. Then one night in her neighborhood, there was a horrible situation where a man took his stepdaughter hostage. For hours, swat teams and snipers et al took over her block while the neighborhood, terrified, watched and waited. Finally, the man pushed his daughter outside and set the house ablaze.

After that, the birds were so traumatized, they forgot how to be birds.They destroyed the nest they had and frantically built another. It was huge, three feet across, and full of holes and looked like they had gone crazy. Their eggs would fall through, and sometimes they would push the babies out of the nest and she would find their little dead bodies on her sidewalk.

Finally, Karyn tore down their crazy nest, threw it away, and forced them to build a new one, hoping it would make them remember how to be birds. It worked, and the birds were happy, good parents again who raised happy little bird babies. (You get the analogy, right?) 

Those were the highlights. You want to read more, don't you? Go on over to Empowered to Connect and learn how to better love your chicks. And Mary at Owlhaven also wrote a great post.

The Theology of Adoption

So, I was a little bit late to the conference Friday morning. Partly because I was driving my momma's car, and my momma, a woman who has never lost her keys in the entire time I have known her, lost her keys.Partly because it was just too hard to wake up at 5am like I had planned.

Ergo, I missed the majority of Dan Cruver's opening talk on the Theology of Adoption. If you go here, you can read about it in detail on the Together for Adoption website. I hope you will. I never grow tired of hearing the gospel of my adoption.

But for this blog, I'll give you my much simpler rendition.

In less than a year (hopefully) Walker and I, citizens of the wealthiest country in the history of the world, will travel across the globe to Africa to retrieve the child who has been chosen for us.

We are unknown to this child. We are complete strangers to her. She does not know our ways, or how we think. She could not even fathom these things about us if she were to try - which she would not. Because she is an infant, her mind is not capable of grasping who we are or the land from which we will come. But even if she were older, Houston, Texas is so utterly disparate from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that it would take much explanation to supply her with even a glimpse of our world. It is simply beyond the scope of her experience and imagination. Inconceivable.

This child is nothing like us. First off, she's much smaller than we are. In addition to that, she resembles us only in the way that all humans resemble. I guess you could say that she is made in our image in that she will have two hands and two feet and two eyes and ears and a nose, but aside from the basics, we are very different. Her skin will be much darker. Her hair will be much different and require me to learn a brand new skill set in order to maintain it. Her skull will be shaped in the way unique to Ethiopians. Her DNA will contain the reminders of thousands of years of her own personal anthropology. None of mine or Walker's. Her personality will be her own, assembled from the genes of her ancestors. Her mutations will be her own. Her propensity to disease or greatness will not be inherited from either one of us.

This child is an orphan. She has not a possession in the world. And she is an orphan in a third world country on top of that. No one can get any poorer than our Bethie is. We, by contrast, are incredibly rich. Walker earns over a thousand times what the majority of her fellow countrymen earn. A thousand times. By contrast, we are millionaires a hundred times over. The woman who bore her could probably not conceive of the riches that Walker and I possess in our upper-middle-class American world.

This child belongs to no one. And she is female. She has no power. Any intellect and ambition that may be etched in her soul and personality would be cast aside in the daily struggle to survive. If she survives at all in a land of desperate statistics. We, by contrast, have all the power in the world. We're educated, we're healthy, we're wealthy, we're well connected. There is little we could not accomplish, if we chose to do so.

Despite our many differences, for the past year, Walker and I have committed to this invisible child. We have denied ourselves financially as we struggle  to raise an exorbitant amount of money to pay her ransom. We have suffered emotionally and mentally in the process. We have lost friends. We have strained relationships with family. We've endured the questioning, the mocking, and the criticism from others for our choice.

Somewhere there is a woman who is pregnant with a girl. The woman will make a great sacrifice to give her life - either by her own death, or by handing the child who has kicked her womb for months to strangers with a desperate plea for them to care for her. The sacrifice will not be easy. The sacrifice will be costly.

And soon, when the time is just right, we will take a long journey to a land that is in some ways a reflection of hell, where death abounds, where disease is rampant, where evil preys on children, where life is cheap. We will not count the cost as we will take a child we have never known, who is not of us, and hold her in our arms tell her how far we've come for her. We will cover her face - the face that looks nothing like our own - with kisses. We will give her our name so that all the world will know that she belongs to us and is a rightful heir to all of the riches we possess. We will ask her to call us Daddy and Momma and we will always answer her when she does. Then we will bring our child back to our life and our family and our home and our hearts and she will be an orphan no more.

And we will understand the Theology of Adoption in a way that we never could have before we found her.

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a women, born under the Law, so that he might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘ABBA, Father!’ Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

Galatians 4:4-7

A father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, 

is God in His holy habitation.

Psalm 68:5

Dreaming big

Last night, after spending two days at the Together for Adoption Conference in Austin, I laid down with the feeling you have after a funeral. You know the physical, emotional, spiritual exhaustion that makes you want your bed more than anything? That feeling.

I slept. I slept well.

This morning when I woke up, I had an email from Joel Osteen. (He emails me often, thanks to my friend Jolie who thought it would be cute to put me on his list.)

And here's what Joel had to tell me:

Dear missy,

Victoria and I want to invite you to join us tonight for our LIVING YOUR DREAM webcast.  You’ll be encouraged during this wonderful time together as we share life-changing stories about God’s goodness and what He wants to do in your life! 

We want you to know that you can experience God’s best every single day. We serve a God of more than enough, a God who loves you with unconditional love. Today, you can be confident in God’s promises and start believing for your dreams!

Click here to share your dream with us!!

I'm thinking I should click there to tell Joel my dreams.

Something tells me my dreams would be a little different than the prosperity  "gospel" he loves to sell. Something tells me that my idea of God's best and Joel's idea of God's best differ a little.
 

I dream that some of the 160,000,000 orphans in the world would 'experience God's best every single day.' I dream that more Christians would 'be confident in God's promises' that the 'God of more than enough' will provide the funds to adopt one of his children. I dream that the Church would notice the many verses in the bible about protecting the fatherless and be determined to share 'life-changing stories about God's goodness' to a toddler who scrounges for food on the street. I dream that the Church would make it her mission to share stories of 'God's unconditional love' with the foster child who has not one person alive who loves her. I dream that the Church would care more for orphans than Hollywood does. I dream that the Church would do more for orphans than the UN does.

I dream that the average soccer mom who loves Jesus was the spokesperson for orphan adoption, instead of Angelina Jolie.   

It's going to take more than watching a webcast to see these dreams realized.

I'll be blogging about the conference all week. I've got lots to say. Most of it hurts. Still, I pray you'll read.

Then, let's live the dream.