Day 23

Day 23-Holidays

We are quickly approaching the anniversary of our adoption day. My husband and I boarded a plane early on Thanksgiving morning two years ago and returned home a few weeks before Christmas with a new child. The holidays that year were different than years past but precious. And I'm sure partly remembered through a rose-colored, jet-lagged haze. I will always remember picking out our Christmas tree as the first time my little girl reached for my hand. And the photos of our kiddos unwrapping their presents that year - though there was nothing extravagant in the gifts themselves, scream abundance and grace-our whole family under one roof finally.

And this year as we've gotten a taste of the dreaded ‘traumaversary’-the increase in trauma-driven behaviors around a certain date or holiday (or in our case, both)-we are faced with a choice. We can muscle our way through, leaving a destructive path of anger, hurt feelings, and possibly more trauma as we attempt to make it on our own. Or we can remember that abundance and grace of our first holiday together as a family. And in the remembering, cultivate hearts of gratitude for the fact that we get to do this together. God has woven our family together, purposefully and with intention. He has equipped us especially for this work and yet He has called us to places of deeper dependency on Him to do it. I am forever in awe of the good things our God has done and is doing in our lived - so many of them because of adoption. This Thanksgiving I am pausing to be grateful for this 'grace' work - and the little people He uses to change me into who He intended.