Open Hands

As I reflected on this past year, thinking about any particular themes that were most apparent, one lesson stood out among the rest. Surrender. The image of having open hands came to my mind. Building a house and fostering our second baby have been constant reminders of how little control we have over most of what goes on in our life. Throw in there our household dealing with a heart attack (my dad), appendicitis (Josiah), shingles (me), various health issues with our sweet baby and WAY too many bacterial and viral infections to count and this past year was pretty much a constant lesson in recognizing our frailty, our limits, and the futility of making plans…and I really like having a plan. I also lean towards being an over-achiever, so when my physical limitations, time constraints, or unexpected turn of events cause me to feel like I am just barely getting by, it humbles me greatly. I can have some grandiose visions of family life, social events, special projects and reality seems to rarely match up. The irony of letting go of control is that there is actually freedom found in surrender. I think ‘hope’, which is a favorite theme of mine, is also closely related to this surrender. I have to have hope in a pretty irrational hope to find surrendering freeing, otherwise it’s just freefalling.

Building a house from scratch has been incredibly stressful. At the very beginning there was the financial stress. I knew having the kind of mortgage we were taking on would change our lifestyle. We are VERY fortunate, so I am not complaining, but I kept crunching and re-crunching our budget and I knew something would have to give. And what if the economy collapses? What if Jed loses his job? What if the house is even more expensive than we planned? What if my dad isn’t able to buy his half of the land and our current house? I would send myself into a tailspin with all the variables that were out of my control. However, I can remember a particular moment clearly. I went on a drive by myself and was trying to decide if we weren’t getting over our head with this whole crazy dream of ours. I began to pray and the prayer that came was, “God, this house is yours, this money is yours, this dream is yours. Use them for good. We are just trying to be good stewards, however imperfectly. However you want us to use these resources, let it be your dream, not just ours.” I came home from that drive with a different kind of peace. Through grace, I had surrendered my control of the plans, and I felt…free. Now, don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t suddenly feel assured that everything would work out perfectly. I didn’t suddenly know that all the variables I had stressed about would never happen. Any of those variables could still happen, but I was reminded that my hope is not in the things of this world. I was reassured that whatever happens, I am being tenderly held by the One who gave all these gifts in the first place. These gifts are not mine to control anyway.

When we said ‘yes’ to a 4 month old baby girl in January, we weren’t even sure we would have her more than a few days. Although they didn’t have a lot of information about her, including how long they thought she might need to be in foster care, we both knew this one was our next ‘yes.’ The shelter care hearing happened three days later and her parents, who had met us for the first time, requested she stay with us. It all still sounded like she might return to her parents sooner than later, so we kept saying ‘yes.’ My biggest fear in those early months was that we would end up having her long term and then she would have to leave us. If we were to have a baby long term, my plan and hope is that it would be heading towards adoption, and that has just never seemed to be the direction this sweet girl’s case is headed, but every time that fear started to overwhelm me, I would hear a very clear, “just say yes to now.” Every couple of months there has been a pretty significant and dramatic change to her parent’s situation, and so every couple of months, I start to send myself into a tailspin of all the different variables that could play out with her situation. She’s been with us over 10 months and it is looking like my biggest fear will come true. I would be lying if I said it is easy to surrender this sweet girl, who we’ve grown to love dearly, to the unknown. But what other choice do I have? It’s only more blatantly obvious in foster care how little control we have over the people we love, but it’s no more true than any other relationship. Now, I can’t even imagine that, had we known we’d have her for so long, we might have said ‘no’ to this joy giving, smiley, beloved daughter of ours, whatever pain she may bring us in the future.

This time of year, there are certain meditations to which I love to return. One of these is meditating upon Mary’s ‘yes’ to bear the son of God. I’ve reflected on the questions and fears that she must have felt, yet she said ‘yes’ anyway, and because of that ‘yes’ the world was saved. In Catholic terminology the name of this most significant ‘yes’ is the ‘fiat’ of Mary. Recently, I was given the quote, “May our fiat be bigger than our fears.” This year, and let’s be honest, most years, my fears have been many, but I don’t regret any of our big ‘yeses.’ Surrendering my plans has been an experience of falling into the hands of my beloved. So, as I return to the image of open hands, I realize it was never my open hands I was picturing, but the open hands of the One who is always there to hold me, the open hands into which I regularly fall and am held lovingly. Our prayer for you this year is that your “fiat may be bigger than your fears.”