what next?

How does one prepare? There's a bed from Ikea, a cabinet standing sentry, a handful of toys, blue paint on the walls...

We're editing photos from Tibet, hoping to send letters to all who helped us travel last March. It's a diversion, a way of navigating time when it is interrupted. In a few short months our lives will completely change, but here I am at midnight, writing while my neice, nephew, and in-laws sleep, with pie settling in my belly as my son wanders toward lunch on the other side of the world.

And the questions of our holiday guests..."Is he small for his age?" "Will he get to keep any of his toys?" "Can he drink milk?" "Can he speak any English?" They're from loving friends and family who are honestly and wonderfully hopeful with us...and some are echoes of the same questions that keep me awake at nights, wondering when and how I will know, wondering how long one can live in parentheses.

We have friends who adopted from Guatemala, and they had a nightmare process...they know how long almost and not yet can be. They were courageous and persistent, even and especially when there was no getting their son home as a reward for their faith, nothing that could change the agony of their wait while their daughter asked when her brother would be home. Now he's here, and for the first time in over a year, I have seen them exhale.

So I can't complain. I don't know yet what we'll do, how we'll live. It's one thing to see the photo and to know that this will be, is indeed, our son, and yet to know that numbers don't add up yet. And then I'm asked, "Are you sure you should pay all that money to get one that's broken?" If I'm willing to listen, I can hear the fledgling love in that voice as well, I'll know we're both wrestling with the mighty question of how far one can force the hand of God. Where does that plan, begin, and if the kindgom is at hand, how present is that truth? Sentimentality is prone to undermine faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Not wished for--there are no stars to light this way--hoped for. The hope is some kind of tiny glimmering light when all else is gone. Is it the beginning of Shalom or the fulling of the fruit? Is it the flower in the crannied wall, roots and all?