Searching

I am posting this largely for posterity. 

I hope that some of you who might read it would join us today in prayer.  We will journey further into a search that I never quite gave life in my imaginings nine years ago when  we were completing our first adoption and just weeks away from laying hands on our treasured daughter, Potato, a grip that began then and holds fast to her today. 

Her adoption, her force, the sheer velocity at which we bound ourselves together revolutionized my thinking on love and family like nothing else in my life has ever done. 

Loving my husband's children upon our marriage was so easy...they were imminently loveable and it there was an open invitation to love them first through their Daddy's eyes...and then my own wellspring grew for them...it was so natural.   When our biological daughters were born, their lives placed in our hands, I discovered the joy of falling in love with someone who, though I birthed them and they shared my genetic material, were creations vastly unique and ...love was so natural.  When Potato's photo was on my computer screen for the first time, I have reported to hundreds, that she looked "familiar" and I knew in an instant that my life was now headed, no matter the cost or challenge of the course, to the moment when we would no longer be separated...and to my utter awe and amazement...the love I had for her....was so natural. 

But for Potato, her heart has always yearned to know.  She simply has to know where she came from, what her story is...and why.  I will never forget watching the tears slide down her face for the first time when she processed that she, and her brothers, shared the same trait...they were born of different mothers, who we most likely would never know.  If my chest would have been surgically opened at that moment,  exploded shards of my heart would have painfully littered the floor.

It became clear that in the Master's flawless design of our Potato, she believes there is an answer.  For every thing there is an answer, and if you do not know the answer yet, you simply have not yet asked the right question.  For five years or so now, she has been asking every question she could formulate...and I have weakly answered...'I don't know.'

When in SE Asia this year as the shroud of pain and questioning fell over her beloved features...as it has countless times in the past few years...I knew that as her mom...I MUST do everything I can to help her find the answers to her past, and I felt an urgency for the first time...that I must take action before the trail grows any older....so as to preserve my daughter's heart and her future.

A quick call to our Chinese family, purchased plane tickets, a request of Potato's foster family..."will you help us track back to the time before she came into your loving home?"

We have long since learned that everything presenting in her file as her story...is not her story.  This brought a great deal of comfort as we know MUCH about her life from one month of age until two years, four months, and 2 days later when our hands laid hold of her...

But what happened before....in the one month from birth until she came to her foster parent's home...that one month overshadows everything in Potato's life now...

The details of what we've learned thus far are her story, not mine to tell.  She is the owner, and I will not steal from her.  But I can share that in what must be an answer to my precious daughter's countless prayers...today we journey to her hometown...and we've been told there is a surprise waiting for us there.  Even talk that we might meet a couple who had a daughter at the right time...whom they have no more...who once gave her to a family because they couldn't raise her...

I woke up in the dark today, just Potato and I on this trip, Daddy and the others waiting prayerfully for news...and my heart was asking the Lord..."is today a good day?"  "Please, PROTECT her...don't let her hear anything that could be used for her destruction...PRESERVE HER!"  And this is what I found in the Word this morning...

Psalm 112:7-8 He is not afraid of bad news, his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord, His heart is steady, he will not be afraid.

118:6 - The Lord is on my side, I will not fear, what can man do to me?

118:24 - This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.

Today we step back into time.  We open a box, closed and covered more than eleven years and one month ago...we will peek in and see what we find.  Will we finally see their faces?  Will we be in the same room today with the ones who gave life to this precious treasure who has changed my life?

Of this I am sure...my heart is firm, my heart is steady...I will not be afraid...for this is the day that He has made, just for us...and I will rejoice and be glad in in...come what may.