The Kind of Miracles That No One Ever Hopes For

This week has been every bit of terrible.

Two years ago, Isaac died in my arms.

Three years ago, I still had hope we would bring Daniel home as I posted a letter to our praying friends that we finally got a court date.

This week has been all about just holding on.

Isaac was not pleasant. Really, honestly, he made most people understandably and noticably uncomfortable. He had been shaken at 4 months old and managed poorly medically until we got him at 2 1/2. He screamed so much that it overwhelmed his senses and caused a reaction called Dysautonomia. Basically, his brain went haywire from continued stimulation, seizures, little sleep and constantly elevated blood pressure. The systems that regulate heart rate, body temperature, even respiratory rate would just stop working.

"Too much Isaac, bub, calm down. No one is going to hurt you".

We said those things a lot. It never worked.

Not once.

We said it more so that we would know we were trying to help, not so much with the expectation that it would work. He would wear out

He would wear out his body with his mind, with his fear of being hurt and his inability to process any sensory information. He would ravage his body with the fear of being hurt again. His mind was stuck in a pattern of pain. Isaac was undeniable proof of mind over matter. He pushed his body to the brink, and it crumpled under his relentless pursuit of peace.

But he was mine.

Daniel was so very sweet. We fell in love with him the day we walked into the institution, masked as a home. A home has parents, he had none. He had paid staff that he shared with several other children. He touched my face. I held him until my arms ached. I sat with him in the PICU for days on end. We claimed him, and we loved him. We worked tirelessly to bring him home. When my mom told me that we may lose him because of my work in exposing his “home” and many others, I realized that I knew that. I hoped so intensely that it would not happen. I hoped that justice would win. I hoped that I could help get all those kids out of there AND bring home my beloved son. Daniel did get out of that wretched place. Not to us. He lives with another family. They sought us out after they had finalized his adoption. They updated us. Then, abruptly, his mamma said she was hurt by the fact that we did not trust the choice of his agency to place him with them (the night before our hearing). She has not updated us in a while now. She did not understand that his agency made horrendous decisions for him up until that point, and we were not about ready to trust them now.

We decided against appealing the court decision. It was apparent that they loved him. We were advised that if we pursued an appeal, we would most certainly win. Our happy ending would have disrupted Daniel, and judging by their deep hurt at a very short threat to his disruption, I am guessing that they would have not fared well if he was taken from them. In the end, not pursuing an appeal was the highest compliment to them as parents. But to them, we represented pain, and we were a threat to their ownership of him. Once again, our hope was gone that we would get to witness his childhood. He does not live with us and I will probably never see him again. He has never lived in our home, or slept in the bed we prepared for him.

But he was mine.

When we lost Daniel, my hope for a happy ending for us died. My belief that people genuinely seek out the good when kids are involved, died. I changed. I recognized that sometimes the will of God does not happen because it requires the cooperation of mankind. People said things to us like, “Well, it wasn’t meant to be”. YES, it was meant to be. That child was my son the second I laid eyes on him. That kind of love is a gift from God himself. The evil hearts of man chose not to cooperate, so God redeemed that situation in a different way.

When Isaac died, the part of me that hoped for his earthly healing died. Placing my hope in my own version of redemption needed to die. Hope can be a cruel thing sometimes, if we let it be, especially when it is lost. Hope is not cruel in it being a gift, a grace from God. It is cruel when we assign hope to what is not eternal. Hope is mourned, just like my six year old, dying in my arms is mourned. Hope in earthly things is mourned just as deeply as I think of Isaac every day, several times a day. Isaac died very quickly. We did not have to decide to keep him on a ventilator or not. His heart simply just stopped. Even then we were saved from having to make decisions that no parent should ever have to make. Even then, there was redemption.

God didn’t need Isaac to make a miraculous recovery. God didn’t need Daniel to have a victorious homecoming in order to prove his goodness and faithfulness. If Isaac would have recovered, smiled, enjoyed his life and his family, finding joy would be easily understood. If we would have brought Daniel home after our hearing, our joy would have been self explanatory. It could have been passed over as the result of our own persistence and strength. Finding faith again, after watching Isaac struggle every day, and then dying, along with losing our Daniel due to injustice and corruption, is a miracle.

It is the kind of miracle that no one ever hopes for.

We want the miracles that include our happy ending, where our overwhelming victory drowns out memory of the soul crushing struggle. We want our idea of what hope and miracles are worthy of to be made material. Hope is not cruel in it being a gift, a grace from God. It is cruel when we assign hope to what is not eternal. Hope is mourned, just like losing Isaac and Daniel is mourned. They were mine just as much as your child is that you tuck into bed every night. They are still my sons just as your sons are yours. Death and loss did not make them any less to me.

Just three months after we lost Daniel, Solomon came to us. I had to fly into that very same airport in order to get to the NICU to claim him. We got to Solomon before he went into the foster care system. We claimed him before he was lost to the system that denied us Daniel. He went from a diagnosis that equates a DNR, to a life, yes of struggle, but also of smiling, laughing and joy. Solomon contains within himself, including only half of his brain intact, the truest example of eternal hope and struggle all wrapped up and tangled within one little body. He screamed just as much as Isaac in the first 6 months of his life. His brain was trying to figure out how to navigate the missing parts. He still has hard days and weeks, but he is happy the instant his body lets him. He loves people, especially Doug, and he thrives in the middle of all the action that a large family provides. His smile breathes new life into me every single day. We have often wondered if Isaac had the same diagnosis and Solomon and he was injured before the doctors figured it out. Solomon restores my hope that God redeems, sometimes overtly, but most of the time in a way that you need the eyes of faith to see.

Six months after Isaac died, we brought home the most precious little one from the NICU just a few minutes away. He was 10 days old the day Isaac died, and had been in the NICU for 7 months. We agreed to take him as a foster placement because he was only supposed to be with us for 30 days. That was 18 months ago. He toddles around our house with his many tubes trailing behind him. He laughs from his belly and loves to play. He came from the same general system that I thought would surely be the end of my faith. He has a biological mamma that made the best decisions for him, even though it was not what she wanted and caused her pain. This is the polar opposite of what Daniel had done for him. This little guy restores my hope that people can cooperate with the will of God, and sometimes do, even when it’s hard, even when it’s not what they want, and even when it is the result of things not going the way they should in the first place. My heart breakes for his mamma at the very same time fills with the deepest gratitude that he is here, bringing with him, our hope.

Both Solomon and our new littlest one were unexpected. We did not need them to come in order to be restored and pronounce that God wins. The restoration in fact, was taking place before they came. God was restoring our hearts to say yes when they did come. Our perspective of true pure hope has changed and we pattern our life around it. We know now that we can hope for the earthly reward and even pray for it. We know that God puts in our hearts the way things should go, according to him, if we listen and pay attention. We may just get that right, but often we do not. Our own wants, comforts, and longing for the easy part, often gets in the way of directing our hope in His way instead of our own. We also know that the refusal to cooperate by man can really mess things up. Hope is not really lost, as much as it is pried from our hands by a world that does not care to participate in divine will, and in fact, goes screaming in the other direction. Our hope now lies in the knowledge that we will be taken care of, no matter what comes along. He gives us more than we can handle on a daily and regular basis. We can actually handle none of it by ourselves. Usually if I am having a particularly hard day, it is because I have gone too fast, or skipped altogether, the very things that are meant to sustain me. I outrun hope by putting it into my ability to get things done, instead of into His plan, in His time.

Our being brought back from the abyss of loss and death is a miracle. It is a truer testimony of faith than I would have had if things went as they should. Rejoicing when things go your way, even after much prayer and effort, can be seen by our jaded world as tainted faith and reduce God to a vending machine. Rejoicing after your very worst fears are realized, and you are still alive, baffles our secular culture. Then, when you are not only alive, but grateful, joyous, and carrying on in your calling, it leaves our culture to wonder what you possess that they do not.

Fear drives our culture. The fear of aging, the fear of death, the fear of loss (“I could never foster, what would happen if the child went back?”), but most of all, the fear of pain is really what all those things are tied to. Fear prevents us from experiencing faith and seeing The Divine manifested in our lives. Miracles can only occur if we participate in situations that require the miraculous. Miracles can not happen in the presence of paralyzing fear. That is THE catch of it all.

The things that have brought me back, tucked into the robes of my Jesus, are not when things have gone exactly my way. I wish it were true. We all want the easy part, myself included. We get very lazy when things are easy though don’t we? Hope and pray for your version of the miracle. Clench your fists, bear down, grit your teeth, speak of your vision. If it does not go your way, that does not meant it was not meant to be. God does not put dreams in your soul just so He can crush them, I promise. He promises. All it means is that we live in a broken world. I beg you, do not run from Him. He will stitch you back together. If you are not safely hidden in him, he can not heal you. While you are being reformed, rest, breathe, give thanks, but most of all, know that he is getting you ready to say YES to his redeeming joy. It is a joy that cannot be explained away. It is a joy that is hard won, but worthy of the battlefield in which it was fought for.

No one hopes for the miracle of redemption. To be redeemed means that you were once damned. It is the miracle no one ever hopes for. If we do not participate in the miracle though, we will be counted among the hoards that ran from Him, our only source for healing, limping and wounded, never to heal correctly. We will be permanently rendered with a deformed gait, doomed to roam the earth battling each painful step. Hope for a miracle.