How could April be half over already?
And more importantly, how is it possible that we've already had to close the windows and turn on the A/C?
We are desperately trying to finish up the video footage for the adoption profile. It is a constant anxiety and I don't even want to write about it.
Hopefully, either today or tomorrow, we will be finished and we will mail that torture device back to where it came from- probably purgatory.
The adoption agency cheerily suggests that we keep both the print pamphlet and the finished video as "keep sakes."
Yes.
Because I want to remember the days and weeks and months of constantly worrying about how terrible I look in pictures, how I can't talk on camera, how I'm too shy to ask people to film us, how for the past five years, we should have taken like, a zillion more pictures than we did and because we didn't, somehow our chances of adopting are negatively impacted.
Yes. That's what I want to remember. All those fun times.
I just keep doggedly telling myself that this is just how the system works- it's not set up for introverts, for one thing- and to just do it and get it over with and at the end of this, there is a baby and a woman in desperate need of help who will see something in me that will speak to her.
I don't know what it will be. I can't know. I just have to keep on taking one step after another after another.
To be just completely honest, when this is over and everything is settled, I never want to remember this part of the process again.
Ever.
The times I want to remember happen well after this point.
We could be active right now, but for some reason, the home study review fee is not reaching the adoption agency. So far, we've sent them two checks.
I don't know where these checks are going. Probably the place where spare socks end up.
If they could just get that two hundred dollars, we could sign the activation agreement, send them thousands of dollars more and then we would be officially presented to prospect birth mothers, via the horrendous pamphlets and video-soon-to follow.
When yet another plan for video taping fell through, I turned to Jesus with that gesture of complete and utter stupefaction- like, what are You trying to do to me?
It will work out better this way, He assured me.
Honestly, I have no idea how, but I try to believe Him.
I woke up this morning surrounded by His warm and loving embrace and the word joy kept drifting through my thoughts.
I'd fall back asleep, wake up again to His love and think, what was I was remembering?
And I would remember it again- oh yes- joy.
In particular it seemed to be attached to a snatch of a verse: for the joy that was set before Him.
Then I looked it up and was embarrassed that He was somehow offering that to me, as a sort of comfort for my extremely tiny and hardly worth mentioning discomfort, but anyway.
I share it in this blog because I recently read a blog about that particular verse and the writer suggested that the joy Jesus was thinking of was mainly His exultation, which made me raise an inquiring eyebrow.
I was not quite sure, myself, that it was His, quite rightful, exultation that He was thinking of.
It was us He was thinking of, I'd be willing to bet.
