We’re well over the two-year mark with our son. We’ve seen a lot of progress and we are hopeful for more. We grow tired, weary and honestly quite frustrated and rather “done” at times but we keep going. We enjoy the good moments and pray through the hard ones.
We’ve realized we are not only on a long journey, we are working on a story. Joseph was sold into slavery, rejected, accused, forgotten and yet decades later, he saw the value in the fact that his story wasn’t easy and most likely wasn’t one he would have written himself. But in the last chapter of Genesis Joseph tells the very brothers who had sold him off that although they meant to harm him, God used all those hard years to accomplish His will…at that time it was saving Joseph’s family from certain starvation. God’s Word is full of those stories of individuals who make a far greater impact than they could ever see or ever know.
There is no way in knowing what God is doing in the realm of the big picture with our son. But I’m certain, when we reach the end we will look back and be able to see the many glorious and refining things God was doing with this one child. We know that He is using our son and all of his complex health and emotional issues to teach us about His character and the glorious concept of eternal adoption. We know that a child being redeemed and restored is God’s will, but the greater picture, the far-reaching effects to those watching and in those places that we cannot even see, comprehend or know…only God sees that – we just have to trust that God, in His perfect love for us is doing what is best for us, what is best for our story.
We can celebrate markers, those “oh, we’ve come so far,” moments. We mark them off with birthdays, holidays, all the firsts that a child celebrates, but there are deeper etchings that are of a more supernatural nature. They are refining moments being written upon our hearts, our children’s hearts and upon the hearts of the world as they watch us live out James 1:27 even with children that cannot yet return love. Like Joseph we might feel as though we walk through years, decades even, being misunderstood, forgotten, unappreciated and rejected…but God will use it all for His greater purpose. Though we won’t always understand what is being written with our child and their story, we can know that none of it will be wasted – God will and can redeem it and use every bit of it for His glory.
