…unpacking…

Hello. Sorry for the hiatus. There has been much to unpack in these weeks. A lot of reliving emotion and trauma, a lot of discussion about our theology and what we believe about God, what we know to be true about God, and many of the seemingly unreconcilable realities of the God we serve and place our faith in. Buckle up, this sucker is long, and you might hate me by the end.

In many ways, initially, we felt pretty good about not bringing Keane home. I guess I should say, we weren’t as upset about it as we might have thought. We felt like everyone following our story had their breath taken away when we announced that the adoption did not go through. We felt like everyone around us was feeling it a lot more than we were. We had 2 types of responses that we were kind of caught in the middle of. One group of people were like tear their clothes put their faces in the dirt struck by it. A lot of asking, “Why Lord?” “Why would you allow C.J. and Renee’ to continue to suffer when they have already been through so much?” For many of the people closest to this whole thing, the real insiders, they were just so conscious of the raw pain Renee’ and I have been walking through, and continue walking through daily, that they couldn’t imagine that this would happen. These are many of the people who bleed our blood, and we are so unbelievably grateful for that, that you would be that connected to us emotionally. Truly, you are our brothers and our sisters. I hope that something like this can serve to be as much about God messing with your theology as it has been for us.

The other response has been the pretty normal response I think all of us want to lean towards in these kinds of things. It is the response we truly believe will offer hope to the hurting person we are standing before, the one I have spent the majority of my life giving. It is the one about how God has a plan, He never closes one door without opening another, and that don’t worry it will all be okay in the end. I think when we respond this way our intent is to offer hope. At our core, we want to believe that God really intends our good, and in that moment, we are trying to make that person feel less in despair. This response is by far the most common one we have come across.

I have to be honest, that last paragraph was written and rewritten about 3 times, and if you saw the first one, this may be your last trip to the blog. I am in a pretty raw place at the moment. But as we have walked this journey, one of the things we have had to just deal with is that people don’t know how to respond to us how we want them to at any given moment, and frankly, I wouldn’t know how to respond to me either, so regardless of anything you have ever said to me or Renee’, I promise, we are totally cool =]. We love you, and feel loved by you. All of you.

Our response to everything went something like this. First and foremost, no matter what, there is something inside that deeply longs for things to go the way we want them to, a fear that at the last second it will all go to Hell, and up until now, a confirmation based on the way it plays out, that it is going to in fact end bad every time. But we pick ourselves up off of the ground (did I say we? I of course meant Jesus) and we trust, open our hands, and walk in the forward direction. So all that to say we went in to this thing at least a little, if not a lot guarded. We chose to wait, for example, until the papers were signed and we were back at the Hotel before Renee’ breast fed the child. All the mommas just breathed a big sigh. That was a really really good thing. God so protected us there. We postured ourselves from moment 1 in this way, “God, is this Keane, or is this some other kid?” This was big in that at the end of the day, we didn’t lose OUR son, we really didn’t LOSE anything, we just aren’t picking up OUR son today. On top of this, there was something funky in the air pretty early on in the dynamics of the birth mom, the case workers, etc… Those of you that know us well know that we are both fairly perceptive. The mom decided to see the baby a lot, so there was a ton of passing him back and forth from room to room. She also put of the signing from 24 hours to about 36, which was a huge deal. He was born Monday, and about Tuesday afternoon Renee’ and I both were really starting to question things.

The situation was complicated, we don’t want to give all of the details, but it was a sad outcome on multiple levels, and we are praying for that mom and her child.

We were amazed like I said by our lack of despair over it. Of course grief, tears, sadness, but not despair. This is a really intricate and vulnerable part of the story for us, so I invite you in, because we love you and we believe in the power of community in the Kingdom. There are several factors in understanding our own response and we haven’t come full circle yet. One factor is this. That wasn’t our son. We are hoping and praying that on some level, there is a spiritual and physiological aspect to that which is by design. The challenge in that is that as we look back on the moment he came out of that operating room, we didn’t feel at all how we thought we would feel. He didn’t look like we thought he would look (what you all were thinking and not saying =]), we weren’t very emotionally connected, and the whole thing was just kind of weird. If we are both honest, there was something deep inside where we were like “is this Keane?” So when we found out that he wasn’t coming home with us, there was in a weird way, a small sense of relief. This combined with the obvious recognition of God’s sovereign hand in that moment made it pretty easy to initially be like “uh, ok…well…guess that wasn’t him, let’s go home”. And in that we wanted to care for those of you who on your end were anticipating and I am sure imagining us in some hospital room in another state somewhere, tearing our clothes, cursing the day of our birth, and laying prostrate in a puddle of our own blood and tears. So our blog post was really coming from a genuine place of wanting to communicate “everyone, we are okay”. The other side of that is, we have been to much darker places this year than that moment. So there was a little bit of that going on.

Later, the question came to be asked, “Why was that so easy to get over?” And that question friends has led to the silence between this moment and that last blog post. It sounds nice, it sounds like relief, but the ramifications of having to ask that question have been a really heavy burden to bear. I want to believe that it was all because he wasn’t our son, and when it is our son, we will be weeping with joy, feel immediate connection, he will look like he does in our dreams, and it will be clear as the day is long that this is our child. But we don’t know those answers, and cannot presume those things. I don’t say that hoping that you will email us and tell us why it will be that way and don’t worry because when it is your baby you will just know. For right now, we need to live in that mystery with the Lord, because it forces us to rely on Him in such a dangerous way, a way that is deep in our souls and necessary for us as we become simply eternal beings. So, while initially we were doing pretty good, the outplay has really sucked. We are scared. We didn’t have to wonder about loving Titus and being so enamored with him at every second. It’s just hard. Our story is unique and ours and involves 3 miscarriages and a little boy named Titus, which makes this thing very mysterious and we are okay with that. I know you know this, but we are walking through it with each other, with the Lord, and the few in our lives. We can’t figure it all out, and are treading in uncharted waters, and that is not only okay, it is probably a good thing.

Let’s talk about how we respond to these things. Obviously, from reading above, there was no way for any of us to anticipate all of these unique dynamics, so the 2 aforementioned responses to our situation seem pretty reasonable. I think each of them need to be addressed.

The first one is about us thinking surly there must be an end to the amount of suffering a person will endure. It was overwhelming to see the amount of people responding to us not bringing Keane home with an adamant “really God?” Trust me, we joined you. God has really been working with us on this idea of entitlement in our relationship with Him. We believe that God doesn’t owe us anything. We rejected Him fully, we deserve to be separated from Him because we have overwhelming chosen ourselves over Him, which is idolatry, which is sin. He, in His goodness, saved me with the blood of Jesus, not because I was less of a sinner than Hitler, or did more good than bad in my life. After becoming a Christian, I now have everything I actually NEED, not want, need. And I have everything I NEED because I have Jesus, and am marked by the seal of His Holy Spirit, which meets and sustains all of my needs. Want is an interesting aspect of our faith. It is certainly in there, but I think so misunderstood. I want to be a dad, Renee’ wants to be a mom. Does this want align itself with the heart of God? If I want it, does God have to give it to me in order for me to be loved by Him? Is there a guarantee that Renee’ and I will be parents? Has God promised us that we will have a child before we die? Is it possible that we will have failed adoption after failed adoption after failed adoption? I think it is possible. It is unlikely, but not impossible. How many more times do we try and fail to have a child before we start thinking God is trying to tell us something? Is this a timing thing more than a whether or not thing? Do you see how all of these questions make both of the responses above really difficult and messy?

The first response really is this “God, you let us lose a child, ok, we understand, it was hard, but you wanted to use his life and death to impact a few thousand blog readers and people in our community. But Renee’ and I have glorified You and been on really good behavior since then. Remember how we stayed faithful to You and glorified You? Isn’t it about time you gave us a child? Isn’t it time for us to be blessed?” When I respond that way I am turning the God of the bible into all of the other pagan gods people worship, the gods who reward good behavior. The gods you can manipulate by doing and saying all of the right things. This is not the God we worship. The God we worship is worthy of all praise and honor and glory, despite whether He gives me what I want, and think I need. This does not mean He is not FOR me and that He will not BLESS me. He certainly will, but blessings always, always come in different packages than we want them to, and often we don’t recognize them, and they end up in the trash.

The second response is a different way of articulating the first. The thing about all of this is, Renee’ and I are becoming more and more conscious of our desire to coerce God, and everyone else’s, and we are walking through and trying to unpack it all. We don’t have answers to all of these things. We are very much broken, and a mess in all of it. We covet your prayers and your love. At the end of the day, we WANT God to mess with everything we believe about Him so we can cry out to Him and beg Him to by His mercy help us put the pieces back together, and we are overwhelmed at how He does so every time. We love Him, we worship Him, we fall on our knees and submit to Him.

I hope our journey and this ridiculous, long rant of a blog, causes you to start unearthing some stones in your relationship with God. If you don’t know Jesus, check the guy out, I promise you, He is the One true God. I hope our story has forced you as it has us to ask some really hard questions about who God is and how He operates. I do know this, He loves us, and redeems brokenness. We will keep trying to let you see where we are at in all of this, though sometimes it is hard for us to do.

C and R