Unfortunately for me, I am not. I am not used to it, nor do I like it. Skipping past those verses in Psalms and the book of Isaiah about waiting on God (like this morning) are my least favorite admonitions. Those words are not poetic to me; those times in life are not poetry.
It is almost as if I am surprised that I should still have to or that God desires for me to relearn lessons in the process. As I consider the Esther Process, the book I am writing and the life I am living in conjunction, I realize that as a writer and an artist the craziest moments that probably make creating harder is when art doesn't imitate life - when it is instead an echo of life. And this book, this book about the process, is really a book about waiting for destiny to be birthed. It is really about the middle, the interstice, the God who moves in silence and in the dark when we cannot see the end yet. And honestly, I have figured out why I have shied away from writing the rest of it.
I have not written much here on my blog about the process my husband and I are going through right now...mostly because it is much too hard to put in words what that process means. It is also a very sensitive and private matter that I have to use wisdom to disclose because I can't say too much. If I were physically pregnant then it would make sense to be quiet, like expectant parents are wont to do when early on in a pregnancy. A lot of times couples in the first trimester of pregnancy do not tell anyone that they are expecting because it is such a touch-and-go situation; the moment is so precarious and fragile that breaking the news seems to be a jinx. They wait until the right time to say it.
But I am not physically pregnant.
We are not expecting a biological birth.
We are expecting a spiritual one.
Most of my life has been more about spiritual awakenings than physical ones, anyway. I forgot to tell my husband that when he married me. My life is a living metaphor that few ever understand. God speaks in silence, in riddles, and then in metaphors. And so, now, my husband has been invited into that metaphorical existence where faith is a constant and the mysteries that seem so evasive for others are much more commonplace for me.
And here we are.
We are waiting. We are in a process that I never saw coming. When I talked my husband into us becoming foster parents with the potential to adopt one little girl in particular, I did not think for one second that this process would be so emotionally crazy. The ups and downs on this rollercoaster ride has been traumatic. It wasn't supposed to be such a life challenge - except, even I knew from the outset that the joining of her little life with ours would undoubtedly be that. The joining of lives is so much more than any of us realize when we build covenant through marriage or birth or adoption. It is blood and bone and marrow; it is deeper than skin deep. And the only definite in the joining is that God must be the determinig factor; His will is the only constant.
We are waiting to call this child ours. We are waiting to love this child fully and completely and generationally. We are waiting to love her as family, inviting her lineage into ours, spiritually Locke-ing her in. We are waiting to love her children and her children's children and her children's children's children. That is what adoption really means in the grand scheme of things. The lines intersect and become one. The branches of the family tree become even more expansive and expressive. We are waiting to bless her and to be blessed by her.
And in this space, in this process, we are learning to breathe through the waiting. We are learning to rely on God. We are learning not to say "If she will be in our lives..." We are learning, although it shakes the very culture and the expectation that we should prepare for the worst, that we are to say that she is here now. Although she is not legally our daughter, she is part of us; she is part of what makes our family whole for this moment. She is loved by us for this moment in time; we may be scared of the outcome that we cannot see from this vantage point, but she deserves to be loved now. She cannot even remotely wait for that.
This Esther Process for us is our undoing and the remaking of all we need to be in this season. The 6 months of myrrh is nearly over and we are getting ready to enter the 6 months of special spices. In the story this was part of the physical process that Esther and the other women in the book of Esther Chapter 2 had to endure as part of the queen contest. I won't get into details here because you will need to read the book to see the spiritual correlation in all our lives. However, I will say this: for my husband and I, this journey is much more than we could have ever imagined. I could never have prepared him for the possibility of heartbreak and the assurance of a heart change.
But this process is challenging everything we thought we were signing on for. This is the waiting period...the first trimester and second trimester ending...the developing of a family in the matrix of life...the challenging of faith.
And so we wait for the manifestation of all that we are hoping for.
