Latvia day 6 - What's In My Heart

I know there are a lot of people following our story, and I think that is great.  Jon and I post pictures of two smiling girls, happy moments, snapshots we treasure now and want to forever.  But I don't want to give the impression that this has been easy.  There has been nothing easy about this process.  From the very beginning, the paperwork has been endless, it is expensive as all get out, the emotional toll is brutal... there have been headaches, worry, many tears, and much heartache.

I know I wrote a whole blog post before about how I feel about adoption.  How I feel when people say these were meant to be my girls.  As if this was God's original plan.  I don't believe that.  I believe if they were meant to be my girls I would have given birth to them, and I didn't... someone else did.  We live in such a broken world and it hits me all the time about the weight of this... the weight of what we are doing.  I do believe that God knew we (God and our family, along with everyone who has prayed and helped along the way) would step in and REDEEM the situation.  To take these girls as our own... but even that isn't easy.  The girls are going to have questions someday about their birth family and the first 5 years of their lives, and we are going to have to navigate through that. 

Communication is hard.  Trust is hard.  Bonding is hard.  We are here for 3 weeks trying to bond with these girls and have some sort of normal life, when nothing around us is normal and we don't even have all of our family here.  We are trying to teach them English when they are still surrounded by people speaking Latvian.   It is all hard.  I don't feel like a hero, I don't feel confident... I am scared, exhausted, homesick (and I love traveling to foreign countries!), missing my boys, missing my dog,  and looking forward to when we can really start bonding at home.  I am trying to fully rely on God and His promise to make something beautiful out of this.  The girls still ask every morning if we are going to America.  It is hard to explain to them why we have to be here so long.

These are broken girls.  There is pain that they are dealing with that I will never fully understand and they don't even know how to express it yet.  I know, I post pictures of them and they look normal and happy.  And most of the time they are happy, but I think it is a coping mechanism.  They are survivors.  I do believe they like Jon and I, but if another family came along right now and took them, I think they would smile and be happy with them as well.   They have no concept of family ties.  They are used to people coming in and out of their lives.  They are not bonded to us (yet).  For example... there is a man that has been driving us to a few of our appointments the last few days.  The girls don't know him, they have only seen him the few times we have, and yet he came by our apartment last night for something and the girls wanted to be all over him.  They have no idea if this is a safe person or not - they just want attention.  I especially see it with men and it makes me nervous. 

They crave attention from Jon.  They always want to hold his hand and sit with him.  They do this to me as well, but I notice a difference with Jon.  When it's with Jon, I welcome it.  The love of a girl's father is directly linked to how she views God as her father.  A girl needs a daddy's love to protect her and tell her she is beautiful.  They will gain much-needed confidence and security with Jon's love. 

I don't know if this will ever get easy.  But, I guess God doesn't ask us to do easy things.  He wants to stretch us and grow us.  He wants us to trust Him and be willing to step out of our box - just like we want the girls to trust us so they can bloom.  And we don't want to be anyone's heroes.  We're especially grateful for the times when we hear that someone has stepped up to do something they were intimidated by (but knew they should do), because of seeing our lives.  Because God makes everyone capable of being involved in great things when we're willing and following Him.

I know you come here to read about our day, and it was another good day.  We got up, played around in the apartment for a bit and then walked to the park.  We thought it was going to rain this afternoon (according to our weather app), but it is 9:15 pm now and the sky is still clear and blue!  Nothing really exciting happened today, so I guess it was a good day.  I did start teaching the girls to sing "Jesus Loves Me" along with hand motions.  They love it.  I am sure they don't understand the words yet, but I hope they will soon.  We serve a big God, who loves these girls and who has given Jon and I the ability to love them like our own.  Pretty amazing...