We were out having pizza for lunch one day when a lady ran up and asked what agency we were with as we tried to leave. She had been watching us and with Ian not speaking but babbling incoherently, Jay with his (happy but) super sensory self, and exhausted (and so) clingy adorable Katie-bug the lady had assumed they were autistic. She said they were so well-behaved that she wanted to enroll her autistic child. She looked uncertain when I told her they were all 5 my kids. I expect we will get many more uncertain looks in the coming years. :)
Eating pizza for lunch has been the only time we've had to eat out since we got home; which is incredible and brings me to my next stream of thought...hang in there with me.
Yesterday, Tim and I went to the first Emmaus meeting since we've been back. (It is an ecumenical group of wonderful people that have been very emotionally supportive of our journey. In fact, when God started nudging us toward our children in China, He used this group as his "nudgers" quite a bit!) There is enough scripture instructing us that our Emmaus friends never questioned "why?!" (James 1:27 "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." Psalm 68:5 "A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling." Psalm 82:3 "Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.")
Yesterday, though, I heard something that bothered me ... although the why of it isn't easy to articulate. Someone who truly was trying to compliment us said that we were his heroes. How to deflect that without sounding snotty or artificially humble, hmm. Tim and the kids and I aren't doing something "heroic". We are trying to follow where God leads us and we are being a "father to the fatherless" (or at least mother, in my case), but adopting is not the only way to follow this scripture.
The people that came up with the idea of starting a Meal train for us, the ones that signed up to bring us yummy homemade meals for the last 10 days, the people that kept our office running so that we could go to China, the people that made sure that our lawn got taken care of and the patients that didn't leave our practice because we were gone for a month, these families were also being defenders of the fatherless. Not everyone is called to adopt but everyone is called to do something.
This really struck me yesterday when we got back from the Y to find dear friends at my house dropping off incredible fresh shucked corn and homemade meatballs and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies that they had worked harder than I had yesterday for my kids. What an incredible thing that is, that someone who gets nothing out of it but a thank you card, would spend considerable time being sure my family is well fed. So really, who are the heroes?
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