A Well-Watered Garden

On Tuesday we had Poptart's Family Team Conference (FTC). The FTC is a meeting every six months in which everyone involved in the case comes together to chart progress, make changes, and formulate requirements for the birth parents, foster parents, and case workers. It can be a tense and awkward meeting, as you can imagine.

Clint and I, Poptart, and her family all had to wait together in a tiny waiting room while the case workers and attorneys arrived. I had this overwhelming sense of....

I don't want to be here.

These people are so different from me. They look different, talk differently, are educated differently. I wanted to go to my home, embrace my precious children, deadbolt my door, and leave it all. I wanted to return to my life of normalcy, and return my family to its original state.
For goodness sake, I wanted to build a picked fence, plant some tulips, and put the blinders back on my eyes.

In an effort to be real, I'll just say it: I didn't want to be associated with those people.

How's that for transparency?

But on my way home, in the blinding rain, God convicted me of my awful pride and reminded me:

Amanda, you are those people.

Jesus is God, perfect in every way. And yet he "humbled himself as a man." He became one of us. He didn't just associate with us....he BECAME one of us. And He saved us. He saved us from our filth, from our brokenness. He "lifted us out of the mud and the mire and gave us a firm place to stand."

When Jesus was walking on Earth, he broke bread with the lowest of people. He didn't care about social status, education, or cleanliness. He loved. He died. He redeemed.

When I found out I was pregnant with Jack (we had decided that week we would wait one more year to start a family....oops), I clung to Isaiah 58:11-12: "The Lord will guide you always, he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail." And the Lord did provide for us through after-school tutoring, frying catfish, and an extra graduate stipend for Clint. I will never forget how clearly God spoke to me that night when I was scared, pregnant, and broke.

A couple of years ago, God redirected me to Isaiah 58. The WHOLE chapter. Directly before those precious verses of 11-12, vs. 9b-10 says "If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, THEN shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday [emphasis mine]."

Friends, as much as I DON'T want to have the child begging for food at a Christmas party, hate changing her sheets every other night, and cringe every time we have to teach hygiene, I DO want my light to shine like the noonday.

I want to be a well-watered garden.

This week we have been reciting John 3:16 in preparation for our family Christmas gathering. Poptart is in charge of the first phrase, and Jack in in charge of the second phrase. As we were practicing the other night, Poptart had her own little twist on her part. She squeezed her little eyes shut and said...

"Por God so wubbed da wold dat he gabe his speshul Son."

His Special Son.

I couldn't have said it better myself, Poptart.