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.

This is so good!

  My E has been back to some sleepless, wet nights.  He's coming home at the end of the day just worn.  I know that it takes every fiber of him to behave, to try to learn, to not do so many things that he's constantly tempted to do.  He is tired from trying so hard and it doesn't help that he isn't sleeping well.  Remember when you had a baby and between late afternoon and bedtime, it's witching hour? Too late for a nap but too early for bedtime? Yah, that's us.
  So we do our strict schedule and it helps.  Mostly, I really believe that God has softened my heart to him in many ways.  I just don't care anymore about a lot of stuff.  Ryan will roll his eyes at me because by 8 o'clock every night, E and I are arguing back and forth.  We both have to "have the last word."  I know my dad is laughing at this right now; this was always the reason I was grounded as a kid.  He gets that from me.
  Today was different.  Today, E came home, did his snack and his exercise and then-wait for it-he went and got his "sight words" and began writing.  It's Halloween, people!  Candy and lack of structure and routine!!  He asked me to help him write his sight words in 10 sentences.  There was no crying.  No quitting.  No whining or pretending to go to sleep.  No thumb sucking.  When he messed up, he crossed it out and started over again.  It was awesome.

  That is what we like to call evidence of God's grace.  

  I had been pretty frustrated.  We have a lot of stuff (mostly really good, see here) going on.  We have a dead beat renter squatter that owes us over a year's rent to our KS house.  I was bummed about that terrible mess.  At work, we've had an "intruder" (think guy with a automatic weapon roaming the halls of a clinic), super young teen moms, mentally ill patients.  Just ugly stuff that weighs on me.

  And then, BOOM.  God shows up again.  At my kitchen table in the form of sight words.  Reminding me of what He is doing in my son.  And in an orphanage in Kigali.  In the homes of 55 (!) families that are matched with kids.  What a blessed, insanely dramatic life we have here.