Well, its been 5 months since our paperwork left for Ethiopia. Still have a long time to wait. While our social worker for ET (ethiopia) is telling us that we will fall at the far end of our estimated wait time (8-14 months) but that we will, most likely be in the wait time.... I have a sneaky suspicion that it will be more than 14 months. Either way, if your counting down from 14 instead of up from 0 - then we are now in the single digit months (9) left to wait! We shall see. In other adoption news, we are in the process of officially signing our Concurrent Adoption Risk Statement so that when our foster licensure is finished (probably mid-March) we can begin taking placements!
In other news...
I don't typically write a lot of detail about ministry. A variety of reasons, mainly just because it's such an abstract thing and each persons ministry is so different that it often feels hard to make any concise conclusion on the matter. However, today I just feel like talking ministry.
For example, how does one equate growth or success when it comes to building the Kingdom of God? The Kingdom is such a backwards, upside-down, skewed thing that to those of us suffering in our mortal forms growth seems like shrinking and success feels much like failure. We've been doing a lot of new things lately in our ministry here in Cincinnati. New mentoring programs for youth. New logos and websites and volunteer manuals and policies. New, and wonderful volunteers. New approach to how we collect and prepare food.
So much new. So much that feels like growth.
And yet, ironically all of these different things have done one thing consistently: created a situation where I feel that there is a shrinking. For example, as we created a mentoring program designed to hold students accountable to mentoring contracts and punctuality and appropriate mentee behavior we knew that student would be forced to choose. Choose to participate and receive the benefits of such participation. Or choose to leave. Sadly, a few students have chosen to leave as opposed to be held accountable to appropriate behavior. It has given me so many sleepless nights and so much heartache as I have lost the regular contact I once had with students I've been building relationships with over the course of the last 6 years. While I know that this is growth in the ministry as a whole as we weed out those that have been a distraction to the others who are really seeking to learn... It feels a whole lot more like shrinking.
I know that that is part of Kingdom building. It's the whole parable of the sowing of the seeds. Different soils. Some fertile, some shallow and rocky, some full of weeds and thorns, some too hot and dry, some too heavily traveled and open to predators. It seems that the hearts and lives of our urban young people are either fertile, or a horrible mixture of these other types. The kids face so much struggle: People in their lives who will come and steal and eat and destroy the seed of hope we plant, hard situations that cause a shallowness that simply won't allow the seed to take root, peer pressure springing up and choking out those precious new seeds of hope trying to rise to the surface, or a harsh environment creating too much heat to allow the new shoots to survive. It seems that our kids are dealing with all these things at the same time. It keeps me up nights thinking and scheming how to help improve the soil, how to manipulate the variables to create an optimal growing environment.
I feel this way, and these children do not biologically, legally, or even informally belong to me. I feel the same longing to see them know Christ and succeed that I feel about Z or L. I long for everyone in the world to feel the same passion for them that I feel so that with help we really can save a generation of students that are so bright, so full of passion, so longing to be loved and to love. We can help them become some thing great. I know we can.
But right now, it feels a bit like shrinking.
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