Being Gracious

This has been an absurdly painful week for me. I hate that. I don’t hate it just because I’m miserable or because I failed to avoid the discomfort. I hate it because my occasional sixth spidey sense warned me that I would be disappointed, and then I was still crushed even when I anticipated it.

On top of it I’m traveling and away from my Hope kid. I miss her. I can tell she misses me too. We google hangout everyday. It helps, but it’s not the same. I miss her.

This thing with my church is just icky. And I’m forcing myself to stay with the icky because there is a deeper something apparently meant by all of this emotional upheaval. So I’m fighting the urge to just drop out of the scene for a while; I have to think about Hope’s stability and how she has come to like it there. She’s finally starting to express an interest in going to some of the targeted programming; she’s beginning to feel safe there. I don’t want to have to find all of this somewhere else, so I have to grind this out even if I wear my teeth down.

This week, Emily H tweeted me a link to an NPR article about an adoption related ceremony at a local church. It was a short article, but gave just enough to say—look these families want and need support and acknowledgment within their church family. Ironically, I used to attend the church featured in the article years ago. I got up the gumption this Sunday morning to send the link to the pastor tasked with communicating with me. I also suggested that Adoption Awareness Month was coming up, as was Adoption Day, and mayhaps this was a time when they might consider doing something for adoptive families in the church who want some kind of ceremony. We’ve got thousands of people at our church, I’m guessing we’re not the only adoptive family.

We’ll see. I wish I could be more optimistic. I don’t like feeling like this. Hopefully it will pass soon, and we’ll be on to the next thing. In the meantime I’ll try to just focus on being gracious and brushing it off.