Perspective and Awe

I was inspired to write the post below after looking at these pictures.... (ignore the x's!)

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about perspective. Exactly one month ago today, Bill and I got the phone call that will forever change our lives. We were told that after 2 years, one month and one day of waiting to adopt a sibling pair from Ethiopia, that our wait was coming to an end. We were told of two little boys, one 3 years old and one 5 months old. God willing, these two little boys are going to legally be our children in Ethiopia soon and we will be able to go and bring them into our family.

Were you to take three pictures of life in our household 5 months ago, you would see three very different pictures, just like the pictures I saw on that blog. In one you would probably see me looking very tired and weary of waiting, probably talking with Bill over dinner, both of us wondering why we were having to be the ones to wait the longest for siblings in Ethiopian adoption history, wondering what God was trying to teach us through this wait that was already a year and a half longer than we originally thought. Wondering, where is God? Wondering, is God listening?

Zoom out a bit for the second picture. In it, you would see our home among many in our particular community. You would see children playing outside in the street, you would see our neighbors coming in from a long day’s work. You would see a community changing for the better. You would see a lot of hope.

If you were able to zoom way out so that you could see everyone in the world, you might see a tiny baby boy being born all the way across the world in Ethiopia. You might see his 2 ½ year old brother wide-eyed and wondering what was happening. What was happening?

Two people eating dinner, children playing, people coming home from work, a baby being born, his big brother watching, families in crisis, families in pain, families being created in ways we can’t begin to understand, in ways that leave us with nothing but AWE.