I Heart You

Our Travel Countdown

Depart January 25th 2012 CHS - ORD - PEK

                                         Beijing for 3 days....
                                         1/29/12 Beijing - ZhengZhou
                                         1/30/12 Gotcha Day
                                         2/6/12   ZhengZhou - Guangzhou
                                         2/8/12   Consulate Appointment
                                         2/9/12   Guangzhou - Hong Kong
                                         Coming Home February 10th 2012 HKG - ORD - CHS

China Bound

China Map

Henan Province (Jadyn's Province)

Guangzhou Map

Gracyn's Countdown Chain

As you all know we will be traveling in just nine days.  Wow seems hard to believe that our family will soon be a Forever Family of Four.  I know it was just yesterday that we were boarding an airplane to Taiwan to bring home our Gracyn, and that has been nearly three years ago.  It seems incomprehensible that in a little over a week we will be boarding an airplane to China to bring Jadyn home.  Soon the toddler bed that is vacant will be filled with more than just a child.  She will fill our home and our hearts with so much love.  Not that adoption doesn't come with its challenges, ~ but after all the dust settles there is an unrealized beauty.  A beauty few will ever know or experience.  

Jadyn's Bed

Fill Our Hearts

 He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.  ~ Psalm 147:3

I have been so emotional during the last several weeks.  Consumed with an excitably charged overload that only adoption can bring.  I find myself already grieving for the loss that Jadyn will soon have to endure.  A loss I saw with my own eyes just as Gracyn once endured.  Gracyn taught me something, which at the time, I didn't understand.  In those weeks after we came home from Taiwan, when all Gracyn could communicate to us was pure grief, I found myself asking God the same question over and over.....Why me?  I questioned everything that brought our family to that point including His plan laid out before us.  I focused on all the wrong things.  I spent countless hours watching her heartbreak and discomfort as it perpetuated a cycle of internal dialogue within me....Why did you chose me???? I'm not supposed to be her mother.....I'm not cut our for this sort of thing..... No one told me it would feel like this.... I didn't know it was supposed to hurt.... Why doesn't she want my affection???? Why won't she smile????  She doesn't even like me..... Why doesn't she want to be held, or cuddled, or touched???  I felt rejection and many other feelings which at the time, I was ashamed to admit.  I repeatedly found myself very alone, because I knew no other adoptive mother could EVER feel the way I did.  I didn't want others to know the heart I was hiding.  I had envisioned something so different that the experience brought me to my knees feeling very lonely, and confused....  It was only when I granted my own heart the permission to remain open to the experience, that I would understand.  When I turned off the "me" part of my heart, I felt the answers through my grieving child who........ will never know her birth family, lost the only home she had ever known, uplifted by the roots of the beloved country of her birth, who must learn a new language to help others meet her basic needs, try to process why the people - who look nothing like her, would want to take her away from the only people she called family, who finds the food and smells different than she was used to, and wonder why she is now far from 'everything' she has ever known.  Now I must be brave enough to remember those same feelings that will help build that bridge to family.  


"Break My Heart for What Breaks Yours," is the phrase I couldn't stop thinking about at that time, and find myself remembering it now.  How can we truly understand and be humbled by the world around us if we never allow ourselves even those short walks in the hearts of others.  I am so thankful for a gift I almost didn't receive through my daughter Gracyn.  The gift and ability I've coined "heart walking."  Few allow themselves this 'freedom,' of  "heart walking."  They deprive themselves of something fundamental to our being, that over time is lost.  It's part of what makes us compassionate beings, and who only God can lead us back to.  So in the days when I see Jadyn at 2 1/2 feel a seemingly boundless grief, I will remember the 'bridge' that brought my unwilling heart to feel hers which will "break."  The heart I know will heal.  


With courage I welcome the "heart walk."  Walk with us.  Experience all you've denied, and deprived yourself of feeling.  Let God "Break Your Heart for What Breaks His."  Because what I've discovered is 'adoption' is part of my own fundamental journey "Home."  Let our adoption, help build your bridge that helps you find your way back home.