Then he said this.

     Once, in college, I was hanging out with a student priest (is that a thing?) in a bar in Guatemala.  All good stories start like this, don't they?  He was about my age, but our worlds could not have been further apart.  My priest-in-training friend had grown up in a rural village in the mountains of Guatemala.  He was an orphan. He told me that as a young boy, he had been adopted by another family, but that he later ran away from them.  I asked him why and he told me that he never felt like he fit in because he was darker skinned than his adoptive family; and that because he was old enough to remember he was adopted, he could never "forget."  He said that even though they told him they loved him and that he was their son, he never really felt like he was theirs.  Oh.  I didn't have words then,  and I still don't now.  It just sucks. As a naive college girl, this conversation made me stomach hurt and opened my eyes, just a glimpse, to the plight of orphans.  I wish I could find that priest friend now and give him a mama hug.
    I remembered of that story tonight because I am praying for God to speed up His healing process for my own boy.  It seems like we've had E forever, that surely enough time has passed for him to feel like he is home.  It seems like all our repetitiousness, our intentional everything, our deliberateness with him would have erased his painful passed.  It seems like it to us.  But we aren't really the ones that lived it.  That live it now.  Tonight, after E told a lie,  I told him that I was praying for the day that he could trust me with all his heart.  He began arguing and I held his hands and told him that even if he lied to me every day for the rest of his life, I would still love him and be his mom.  Then he said

"But what if you want to send me back?"

    Just like that.  Ripped my heart right out of my chest.  My son, that has been home for 5 years, went on to tell me that the reason he comes in our room sometimes is because he wonders if we will send him back to the orphanage if he is bad.  He even said something about how "even the nuns didn't want me after my birth mom took me there."
     So we cried together.  We prayed for God to bring E redemption tonight.  We prayed that he would know in every corner of his heart that we forever his.  Come Lord Jesus, come.