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A Most Extraordinary Life
I read this verse this morning in my devotional and it made me think about Dan and my life together.
Ephesians 3:20 says, “Glory be to God, who by his mighty power at work within us is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of — infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, or hopes” (TLB).
Whenever we are in the hospital, people say all the time that we are amazing. It makes us both uncomfortable. It’s not a pretending to be humble thing. As Dan said the other day, it’s like being thanked for breathing. Let me assure you that we are not amazing. We are human. We make mistakes. We haven’t done anything amazing. We just decided to be obedient when God called, stepped out in faith, and trusted God with everything.
We didn’t set out to have twins early or to deal with all the complications that they had, or to bury a child. In fact, presented with those options, I’m pretty sure our 23 year old selves would have said “NO!”
We didn’t set out to adopt a little girl with a major heart defect, but when face to face with a little girl who was alone and just needed a family to love her, what else could we do?
When we did set out to adopt again, we were just going to do one more adoption. It made sense to add the second child when China made the option available. Hope really wanted to adopt a little boy with a heart defect and we would be able to do that. God lead again and we followed.
When we went to adopt, our hearts were broken by what we saw in the orphanage and by how Ben and Maisey reacted to us. They just wanted love and they soaked our love in. I will never forget watching Ben cling to Dan from the moment he met Dan. Ben loved Dan from the beginning. Ben clinged to Dan. When we visited the orphanage Ben had lived in for almost 4 years, Ben absolutely refused to go to any of his previous caregivers. Instead Ben buried his head in Dan’s neck and held on for dear life. My heart would never be the same again. Our hearts were forever broken for the children who wait. We said, “God use us. We will follow!” We knew we could do more so we said “Use us!”
It’s easy to pray to God to use you when those are just words that you are uttering. The hard part begins when He starts to show you what He wishes for you to do. You doubt yourself. Satan uses the world to whisper in your ear that you are not enough. You will never be enough. Dan and I are only human. So because of those doubts and fears, we put limitations on our obedience. We said we wouldn’t adopt an older child. We wouldn’t adopt a child who had severe mental delays. We felt that this would put an undue burden on our older children. If something happened to us, they would already be caring for Codey. How Could we ask them to do more?
The very next year God lead us to 4 children, an almost 14 year old girl and a severely delayed little girl, plus two little heart kiddos. I won’t go in to details here, because I’ve written about it a lot in past blogs, but that year was an amazing year of God showing up and making miracle after miracle happen. We didn’t set out to adopt 4, but we heard Him loud and clear saying “put 4 on the homestudy” when we started. We had no idea what it meant. Then we set out to follow where He lead.
We ended up adopting two more the following year. We knew we were probably done. 14 children, 11 of them with significant needs seemed like a good place to stop. Then my friend sent me JJ’s picture and said “Doesn’t she look like an Ellsbury?” and my heart was stolen by this sweet face so we agreed to advocate for her.
When Elyse and Grace started talking about JJ being their sister, it was hard. Obviously we would love to help every child but know we can’t so we drug our feet. Elyse and Grace were insistent that she was their sister. They had every child in our house praying for JJ at every meal. They would talk about her as if she already lived with us. And when Elyse, who was lying in her bed after getting ready to go to sleep said, “If she dies in China, I will never be able to forgive myself.”, Dan and I knew we had to seriously look at whether it was right for our family to adopt her.
Truth-be-told Dan and I knew instantly that she was our daughter but we did everything in our power to justify that we had done enough. But God didn’t let up on our hearts. Our hearts grew heavier and heavier for JJ. We see lots of children being advocated for. We pray for many children who have touched our hearts. Our hearts are touched for those children but it is more than that when you know that this is a child you should adopt. It’s almost impossible to explain. Your heart is heavy. You look at their picture constantly. You pray for them. You wake up in the middle of the night to pray and look at their picture again. I never heard God’s voice directly but I knew without a doubt that we were to proceed.
Which leads me back to the verse above.
“Glory be to God”, (not Dan or I or our family)
“who by his mighty power at work within us is able to do far more than we would ever dare to ask or even dream of” We could have never in a million years dreamed up this beautiful life we get to live. I would have never dared ask for so many miracles or to be given such blessings. I believed I was too old. I believed it couldn’t be done. I limited myself by what the world told me could be done.
BUT NOT GOD…
— infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, or hopes” We’ve been through countless surgeries, seen miracles in our healed children, and been given so much more than we will ever give them. I sometimes feel like we’ve used up too much of the good that God gives, as if God has a limit on the good that He bestows to His children.
We are not amazing or stronger or braver than most, but we did choose to be obedient. We have seen God show up time and time again. We trust that He is perfect. We trust that His plan is good. We trust that He can make good come out of the bad. So when God called us to move out of the comfortable, we chose to move forward in faith and get more than a little uncomfortable and because we did this, we get the privilege of living a most extraordinary life.
“But God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn’t come through.” – Francis Chan
