It has been a quite the last couple of weeks. The night before Halloween I stepped on an earring. That’s it. That’s all. I just stepped on an earring. Billy reached over and popped it out and I thought that was the end of it. Within hours, though, the pain was excruciating. Thirty six hours later I couldn’t walk on it at all. I went to the doctor and she put me on a steroid pack and gave me a tetanus shot. But a week later it was still hurting just as bad. All this from a silly little Target earring. It made no sense! I felt like I was going a wee bit crazy. The doctor sent me to get a CT scan and blood work and, lo and behold, the reason it was still hurting was because the entire post of the earring was stuck in my foot! Stuck so much that the I had to have surgery to remove it.
Honestly, I was so glad when I saw that big old earring post in there because it let me know that I wasn’t being the world’s biggest baby – which, I had definitely begun to suspect about myself.
On top of the whole earring fiasco one of the kids has emotionally really been struggling lately. Like, laboring with some big issues. As a result, I’ve been struggling too. Just feeling a little raw and frustrated. Adoption can be hard, man. No doubt about it. And while going into I knew that adopting a thirteen year old and a four year old from foster care when I already had three kids wasn’t going to be easy; the constant variety of challenges can wear on a person.
We go to Church of the Highlands. (Yeah, I know, you’ve got opinions about it.) This month they are doing a sermon series called ‘At the Movies’ where they pick a movie and then preach on the messages in it. This week the movie was Instant Family. It’s about a couple that adopts three kids out of foster care. So…yeah, definitely interesting to watch with my family.
One of the thing that the pastor preached about was what to do when the thing you know God called you to do gets difficult. Like, you’ve done it and now the fun is over and the hard part of making it work is here. He talked about embracing the ‘small glimmers’ of hope and happiness you see. Enjoying the smallest fruit, ya know? So, that’s what I did. I sat in church and started a list of everything that has gone right lately – no matter how trivial it seems.
And so, yeah,’Damien didn’t get mad when Gracie stole his lollipop’ isn’t a big deal to you – it is a big deal to me. There was no eye roll. No anger. He just laughed and, let me tell you, that is a gift. A small glimmer. Seeing the teenagers laugh and smile. Seeing people invest in my family by calling and checking on me. A really good pot of soup. All those things are small glimmers that turn into big glimmers. Heck, I think Ann Voskamp even wrote a book about it. 1000 Gifts, right? I haven’t actually read it because her writing is a bit too flowy for me but everyone else loves it.
Hey! Another upside of having surgery is that my kids don’t have to eat my subpar cooking!
Sadly the dinners that magically come to our door are about to stop. So, now I’ll have to have some small glimmers about something else instead. I mean, probably not about my actual cooking but they’ll be something. There always is.