Changes

We made it through the gauntlet of birthday party/sleepovers...and we are still standing.

This week is full of some more significant events, we have visitors from a special group coming to see us.  We will also welcome a family who is adopting their child from our city to our home for a special night of connecting with them. We have a city-wide "English competition" that our students will compete in this next weekend, too. Of course, this will be AFTER we give mid-term exams this Friday morning!

It is easy for this pace of life to push us on, force us forward even when we are not ready to move on.

For the past year of living Here, several key people who we've connected with, or who were "helps" to us during our period of settling in have left.  It is no joke to say that at least twelve key people have moved on from the school/company/LQ where we live.  Each month we grapple with new news that someone we care about and who has supported us when we've been in a pinch (usually with culture or translation)...is leaving.  This weekend brought news of two more who will soon be gone.

Yet the momentum of life in the schedule of school carries us swiftly on down the river.  We really have precious little time to consider all these changes...we just keep swimming.

This week we will also mark the five-month anniversary of the New Guys adoptions.  How can it already be 5 months?!  So many things have changed with the boys...language acquisition, bonding, The Bruiser can feed himself and walk up stairs alone...much with them changes each week, that we are not able to take into our notice either.

The Bruiser, which I will detail in a further, more focused post, continues to struggle the most at adapting to family life.  His little soul was so damaged by institutionalization.  We are learning volumes more about the ramifications of these things with his development and its effect on bonding...but still...not much time for naval-gazing.    It seems that he will stretch us, teach us, confound us the most of all nine of our children.

Sometimes my parenting philosophy could be summed up like this..."making a big wake."  If we press forward and make a big enough wake behind us, they will all (the children) get sucked into it and pulled along too.  The Bruiser seems to be the only one who is intent is swimming against the wake...pressing as hard as he can against the momentum to join in and come along smoothly.

So far our resilience for change as a family remains high.  Still I find myself thinking now and again about change that moves things that we "depend upon" out of our reach.  Am I holding fast to the Rock, to the Anchor that holds when all else is torn away?  We hold to a faith that does not disappoint...yet when the "holding" depends on me, I so often lose my grip...or my attention is drawn away.

It is mornings like this when I need to return to the Truth and meditate on it...that it is He holding me...and that He will never lose any who He has claimed as His own.  If holding it together, through change and challenge depended upon me, we would be utterly lost.