Tag: guidance

It’s the End of the World

As we know it, that is.

Contrary to that seeming like the title for a post on politics that tastes like chicken (Little), it’s not. Nor am I referencing the song. I’m merely speaking of family:

Our family is finished in China.

Big news for some of you, I suppose, though we ourselves have known for quite some time, informed our leadership a couple of months ago, and had many in our various social circles long since pick up the info from various sources (some with alarming speed).

But for those who hadn’t yet heard, this is our official and finalized announcement.

It’s humorous how different from now our family looked when we moved to China—check this out!

2003 goodbye

(I am also humored that we had only ONE family airport-good-bye picture from that day. Tammy is not, but she gave me permission to post this anyway.)

When we came to China 13 years ago:

-Elijah was still 3 years future.

-Adoption wasn’t anything I’d ever seriously contemplated.

-We couldn’t have imagined the sagas that would lead to Lily, Eden, Hope, or Everett. Or a great many other things.

Now our China chapter is suddenly drawing to a close. Far sooner than we’d have guessed.

 

“Why?” 

Probably the first—and quite logical—question to be asked.

The answer isn’t super clear-cut or simple. We aren’t quitting. We aren’t fed up, or angry, or disenchanted. We haven’t thrown in the towel, given in, or decided we don’t fit. We aren’t despising China, or our organization, or our calling(s).

It was a decision we came to very slowly (in tremendous contrast, by way of illustration, to the “decision”* to adopt Everett). We discussed and prayed about this one for months. In the end, it was a combination of many things that led to believing God was finished with us in China. Certainly germane to the conversation were the realities of our children. Somehow we’ve ended up with six of them. That was never the plan. But HE made my life about adoption (against my will at times), and I can’t ignore that.

Or them.

We’ve got three special-needs charges, now. (And may I say that the chaos is sometimes driving the rest of us ever closer to such categories?) There are educational, emotional, and therapy needs that aren’t necessarily going to be best met in far western China.

Everett’s recent coming played a part in the decision, too. Just before moving here to Xining (though while in Xining on a vision trip), God gave me the closest thing I’d ever had to a real vision, and he reassured me that it was “OK for me to be starting over.” (At “my advanced age of then-42” was the idea, even though that wasn’t quite short of Noah’s 601, who was the character-vehicle of the message).

Okay (I could only conclude), my Next Big Thing is going to be in Xining.

It’s only now in hindsight that I can see: there was no Next Big Thing here, at least not—and this qualifier is important— akin to anything I’d imagined.

His Next Big Thing was Everett. (Though I wonder if it’s not right and best to admit that my book likely belongs in the conversation as well. In fact, I will include it here—in spite of my awareness of the annoyances that Gollum-channeling authors often inflict: “MMYYYY BOOOOOK!”—as an exercise in spiritual and intellectual honesty with myself.) Anyway, because of God’s big idea for us (and yes, sometimes along the way I included a “Hey, what’s the…” on the front of that, as in, “Hey, what’s the big idea?”), I find my life changed. Once more it is about holding and hugging and healing and homeschooling and (come hell or high water, and they do) hanging on. I didn’t ask for that or want that, but I no longer resist it. It’s what he’s given me.

God moved my family from one city to another to save one kid.

“What a waste, eh?” 

Well, that’s what most of us at least some of the time—or at least some of us most of the time—would say. All that money. All that time. All that effort. All those plans. All that strategizing. All those hopes. All that everything. All come to nothing because of what really happened.

One kid?

C’mon.

Yet there’s no denying it: that’s what he did.

So his list wasn’t my list. His things weren’t my things. They were bigger, and they were better, and, most significantly, they’ve got a future while mine fade to the past. This was his big idea.

So if Next Big Thing wasn’t here…

And if the needs of an eight-person family coloring outside the lines of sense became more and more outside the lines…

And if God was clearly doing something in and through and with our family (and by “clear” I mean: “clear it’s something” not that “the something is clear”)…

And if it was unclear how China continued to fit into that picture…

I guess somehow, and with lots of prayer, “going home” just eventually became part of the logical progression coming out of all that. (Please don’t make the mistake of assuming I’ve communicated all the factors here. The number of “somehow”s and “just”s and parenthetical insertions alone should clue you in to that.)

Next is ahead. Whatever that entails. Next is not in China. It’s at home. Though “home” is a bit of a misnomer because, after all, whose home is it? Our oldest has lived 4 of 16 years in America, just one-quarter (for those who bristle at the idea of reducing their own fractions during discretionary reading) of his life, and half of that was ages 0-2. The second has graced the U.S. for three years, the third for two, the girls for one, and Everett never. Even Tammy and I, though we call it home, will no longer experience it quite that way. We’ve done enough reading, have known enough other expats, and have visited enough to know: we won’t fit in like we used to. We’ll no longer be complete insiders. We’re different. In some ways for the better, and in some ways just changed. We’ll stick out. Won’t always be understood. Won’t always be able to so automatically relate, even to people with whom we did before.

But, for better of for worse, July 1st it is.

We’ll be home.

Home to stay.

 

“OK, then, where are you moving back to? What state? 

“Jobs? 

“What will you do, and what’s next for the Johnson family?”

Phew. Finally some questions I can answer without a blog entry:

We don’t know!

 

 

*Named elsewhere, I believe, “God’s 2×4.”

It Begins

Before today, I’d only ever kept an adoption blog.

Which this isn’t.

Adopting twice (7, then 3 years ago) was one more time than we’d planned on.

This blog is a “regular.”

Whatever regular ends up meaning. Its themes are unformed, in spite of having been mulled over for months. Some of you know what that’s like, don’t you? You can introspect so long that, if not for your stomach or your bladder or your kids, an actual crater might start forming beneath your body. You can ponder for such lengths that by the time you’re ready to give your opinion, everyone else has forgotten what the question was. The world moves on to the next thing before we knew what the old thing was.

Social tardiness ain’t the Grey Poupon touch you’re lookin’ for to add class to your hot blog. “Extra! extra! Check it out, homies! Slammin’ fresh blog entry on the cloning of Dolly the Sheep. Along with two unused tickets from the opening night of Titanic, to be awarded to the 4th person to like me on Friendster.”

Current events? That’s a laugh; I’ve lived under a large rock called western China for a dozen years. I probably did seem hip and fresh when I left the States…compared to me now. Somewhat recently (how embarrassing), I discovered that there are actually a lot of blogs out there (I told you––it’s a large rock), and they changed my life forever. I will not read internet comment sections. I will not read internet comment sections. I will not read internet comment sections.

I like writing, but blogging’s siren call never called to me. I desired no soapbox. I had no need to sound off. I couldn’t even think of ideas I had to share. I had only one idea when it came to blogging: how do you handle the relentless pressure of ceaseless content creation? But you have to have ideas––you can’t blog about the agony of blogging (one wouldn’t think, though I’m doing it now) or only write about the agony of writing––who wants to read that drivel? It’s probably not even called blogging. It’s probably called whining.

So I wrote a book instead. Memoir. As the project snowballed, I found the story pretty much writing itself, and my biggest surprise along the way was how deeply in love I fell with the book-writing process. After I’d finished, some months ago now, I stumbled upon a door marked “publishing” and peeked through, only to find everyone within sniggering. “Do you not know, O Greenhorn, that everyone who is someone could have told you that anyone who is no one can do nothing to get their book noticed…without an author platform?” Then they told me that “platform” starts with––though I’d always thought it was “p” myself––”blog.”

Yet that’s not why I’ve begun.

As recently as three days ago, I was “still thinking it over.” For one, I had trouble with the feeling I got from contemplating blogging only so I could sell something. It seemed a loathsomeness barely above the glop of internet comment sections. Second, and more significant, the furthest I’d gotten with my months of sitting around on my brains all day was only (though granted, it’s sock-knockin’) a title: aboutadozenyearsago.com (don’t bother, googling’s pointless). The prevailing logic: If my opinions and grasp of current events were in arrears, shouldn’t I have the blog to match?

It wasn’t as lame as it sounds. It would have been a blog about looking within. Looking back at the person we were X number of years ago, and how we’re different now. A chance to take a break from “Look here!” and share this and link that, to take a breather from checking-in and “liking” everything in sight except the pace of our own life. A time to analyze the business (careful, that decidedly does not say “busyness”) of what it takes to become a better person. Who doesn’t like the idea of becoming a better person? Who doesn’t look back with satisfaction on their unselfish choices? And with different feelings on many lesser choices? Don’t we all hope that, at the very least, growth came from all the times we got it wrong?

We dream of becoming better people, only to have such a hard time keeping our heads above water or our attention off the internet. (Is not internet-based internet bashing such choice modern mirth?) How many important-but-not-urgent opportunities come into focus only as they’re slipping through our fingers?

My imaginary blog title might have been original, but the idea isn’t. I read a blog with a similarly-themed entry just the other day. My wife reads another all the time. But just because it’s not original doesn’t mean it’s not great. Cause we all need to step back in order to go forward. We all need help. From others, from God. I’ve had tons. So have you, so has everyone. It was only as I began to read more blogs that my cynicism began to fall away. Good blogs, written by quality, growing, others-centered human beings with readers who engaged with their hearts, not to mention their (still-connected) heads, people who spoke sense with civility. (How has that combo become so rare?) Thus I disconnected my own blog (the one that didn’t exist, you say? yes, that’s the one) from the shame of soapboxes, sounding off, and simply selling.

I began to cull the stories of my life from about a dozen years ago. I picked twelve because ten seemed too recent, fifteen too distant, and mostly because of how cool it is that we have a number in English that has its own nickname. In my wife’s and my life a dozen years ago, we were preparing to leave the American culture we’d spent our lives in and move our young family to China.

But there weren’t enough. As momentous a time as that was, there just wasn’t enough material. Not enough journals. Even if I borrowed from stories that happened eleven years ago, and thirteen years ago, there wasn’t going to be enough content to actually support an entire blog called aboutadozenyearsago.com. Plus I was coming to my senses, incredulous I’d imagined people would enjoy reading twelve-year-stale minutiae about my life in the first place. So I reverted to what every self-respecting introspective type would revert to: declaring my need for more think time. I needed a dozen more good “crater-sits,” I said, and the dodecahedral perspective that only they could bring me.

Yet here we are. Days later, and I’ve started.

How is it that you, friend, are here reading this and not searching youtube for “guy’s body forms crater”? Well, I’ll tell you. But you should know that the mere operation of typing it out is not easy for me. Because I wasn’t looking for this. Wasn’t expecting it. Or wanting it. In fact, I was explicitly against it.

Unmistakably (= “it’s not possible we mistook him”), God just told us to adopt again.

I’m unsure what this blog will evolve to become. I imagine I WILL write some entries about who I was a dozen years ago…IF I can write them in such a way I think God can use them to help you become a better person, too. And…I am sure I’ll shout from the rooftops, “My book is here!” when that day comes. But for the moment…this blog will be the place where I tell the story of how God took the story we thought he was writing and instead started a whole new chapter we never saw coming.

For the first time (in our adoptive lives): It’s a boy!

He’s already a teenager.

But I’d better start at the beginning…