I am mailing off the application to the home study program today. I have printed out the check list of documents and am already at work gathering them up, or thinking about what steps I need to take to get them.
I went through so many emotions yesterday, thinking about this. I still am. I got angry, for one.
I have to fill out this questionnaire, in order for strangers to read it, in order for these strangers to determine if I can become a parent. I am paying them to decide this for me.
What other people understand to be their birthright, what is the natural result of their intimate relationship and is theirs from the beginning, is instead granted to me by official clearance, through strangers, by a large pile of papers, after a long time of uncertainty.
I got sad. Grief filled me from time to time, this gut wrenching grief that was so deep I simply pushed it away. I was not about to break down and sob on the side of the road, while walking. But I could have.
I thought, God is playing a cruel game with me. Instead of granting me my own little children, He's sending me His own, broken hurting children. They keep passing through my otherwise childless house.
It's like He keeps calling me out deeper, and I get angry at Him. I can't see what's ahead. I don't know what's coming, and He keeps calling me out anyway.
It's as though mailing out that application is the official seal on it- my body is officially barren, it's broken, it won't work. I'm giving up on it and moving on, into something far more complicated.
I don't even know now what it was I used to imagine. Did I used to imagine that I would nurse my children? Did I imagine myself big bellied and sitting in the sun with a bowl of ice cream? Did I imagine that I would see in them my own eyes looking back at me?
In the middle of all this emotion, there is a peaceful center. That is the mystery, the mystery of knowing that Christ is with me, that I rest in Him, in the mystery of His purpose.
There is the understanding that He feels everything with me. Last night, I let go and let myself just rest in the peaceful mystery of His love and purpose and presence.
I cannot know; it is enough that He knows. I can bang my head against the wall of my fears, and give myself a headache trying to see the way clear, or I can fall back into His arms and let it go.
Mailing that application off is like dropping a little seed into the ground, ground that has been thoroughly ploughed and broken up and watered. I don't know what that seed will grow into, or how, or when.
But I have to let it fall. Something has to die in order for a new life to spring up. This is at the heart of life.
