Love your neighbor

If you read my book, But the Greatest of These is Love, (if you haven't, you should!) you know that I fell in love with the Russian people while we were on our journey to bring our youngest son home from Russian. They are warm, loving, and generous people. When I saw the following video, I was not surprised by the kindness I saw expressed in a "love your neighbor as yourself" sort of way. 

Apparently many Russian drivers have video cameras attached to their dashboards called "dashcams." Because the country has an epidemic of insurance fraud, like our own, drivers need proof of their innocence. Sure, there were many strange accidents and pedestrians throwing themselves into the paths of cars, faking injury that were cut from this heartwarming compilation. But many acts of kindness were surprisingly caught on tape. (Maybe I am surprised because so many despicable acts have been caught on camera lately.)

This video is very touching, and the music is beautiful. I am now committed to do an act of kindness every day for the next week that is not in my comfort zone. Maybe it will become a habit. Game on? Imagine such a world!

Did these people act kindly because they knew they were being watched and recorded? It is my firm belief that we are all being Watched. No deed, good or bad, goes unnoticed. Does that fact change the way we behave? I can tell you that I much prefer the personal joy I experience in my  good deeds than the wretched feeling left by my unkind ones. I want my "Video" to play back scenes of me loving my neighbor as myself. 

Now enjoy the video.

consider it all joy

Over the past ten years when I have told people our youngest son was adopted from Russia at the age of seven, their eyebrows go up. People seem intrigued by this information, and they have questions: What made us consider adoption, and why did we adopt an older boy from Russia? Did we consider the numerous candidates in the foster system?

When I respond that I didn’t choose an older boy from Russia, God chose him for me, the eyebrows go up again, but the eyes look anywhere except at me. I am thankful that I do not have to squirm under the scrutinizing gaze of cynicism coming at me from Cyberspace. I know how crazy it sounds! I am learning to answer the disembodied words from strangers. And what I am learning is that we were not the only ones who have had this mystical experience of feeling like God was drawing us toward adoption, that God was the Ultimate matchmaker, lining our family up with a perfect fit for a child who was without a family,  that adopting was something we were "supposed to do."

There are the skeptics, of course, but strangers have messaged me to say that they too are members of the "secret society of 'called' adoptive moms," a label I use in the book to describe how it felt. First against my knowledge, and later against my will, I felt God was selecting me to be the mother of one of His lost and forgotten children. So why did God chose Russia and Roma? Of course I do not know the full answer, but I suspect part of it is because Roma fits so well into our family. He kids like us, his personality is so  similar to ours, we understand each other on a higher level, and I am a strong-willed mother to a hard-headed boy! My older son said, when Roma came, that, until he could think of Roma as a brother, he would consider him an “exchange student from God.” Rearing a child sent from God is a duty not to be taken lightly! Another reason, perhaps more important in God's economy, is that during this experience, we have learned to trust that God knows what we need better than we do. God wants total surrender and obedience.

The reward for our obedience, albeit reluctant and whiny on my part, included cup-running-over joy and blessings!

Embracing God's invitation

Welcome to my inaugural blog. Everyone has a story. This blog is about mine.

Moments when you believe, or know, that you have heard a word from God are difficult to describe. My moment hit me with the force of a lightning bolt. I didn't see it coming, nor did have time to take cover. Never before had I encountered the God who is not silent! I was left singed and smoking. God had stricken me with one enduring, unthinkable directive: Adopt an older boy from Russia.

I was not eager to embrace God's invitation.  Hadn't He noticed that I already had three children? Two were teenage girls, for God's sake! And my precious eleven-year-old son had been the baby too long to     relinquish that coveted role willingly.

I limped along for months, licking my wounds, blind at first to the reality that the lightning bolt had ignited a shallow faith and was transforming it into one that was electrified! During the months I spent in self pity and deep despair, the God of the universe was at work, reordering my life. What are humans that He is mindful of us? I have no idea! My human brain doesn't stretch enough to comprehend that immense, overriding Love for selfish creatures like myself.

I started writing But the Greatest of These is Love while I was on the runway preparing to depart for Russia, still seeking an escape route. That tense experience became my first chapter.

I have been a lifelong writer, as well as a visual artist. Writing is like painting with words. As a kid, my journals were engrossing and therapeutic.  My notebooks of letters-never-intended-to-be-sent let me resolve issues and achieve perspective. Writing this story was no different. In the process, I saw God in places I had missed with just my visual sense. Sometimes sentences and paragraphs seemed to write themselves, exposing more of this personal God with whom I was becoming acquainted and learning to trust.

My desire for readers of But the Greatest of These is Love, and this blog is that they will trust that God’s Divine plan for us is infinitely richer than the confortable little lives we can plan for ourselves. God has been here all along. My motivation for writing this book is to make Him visible.

“If the journey did not include a few unexpected detours, we would hardly need faith,” Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God