Fresh Hope and Joy ... Broken

It was two days before we left for our long awaited summer vacation.  Steve and I had spent twenty days of June in Seoul, Korea, but vacation would be the last word we would put to our time there.

We had just completed our four year wait for to bring our daughter home, we were overwhelmed by our new normal, and we could not wait to escape it all, for the first time as a party of five.  There was nothing more to wait for.  We were finally together, and we had been looking forward to this for so long.

I pushed a cart filled to the brim with vacation groceries, a constantly chattering toddler, and had two squirrely boys and their excited energy surrounding me, as my phone dinged with a text from Steve asking me to call him.

Unfazed,  I pushed through the produce section with one hand and dialed Steve's number with the other, expecting nothing more that a grocery request from the other end.

Instead, as I reached for the carrots, Steve told me that he was let go from his job.

THEY LET ME GO. 

THEY LET ME GO.

My world, in an instant, became a blur. The nice, neat lines of structure that Steve and I had traced around the boundaries of our life had disappeared.

All logic, planning, and understanding now overflowed into the isle as I tried to make sense of what I was hearing on the other line.

Innocence was lost as my eight year old looked at me with tears in his eyes and panic in his face as he started connecting the dots.

Innocence was lost as my six year old began to catch on, and his brother confirmed what this moment in the isles of Meijer would forever mean to him.

The rug had been pulled out from us.

We now had no full time job, would shortly have no income, no insurance.  We had just brought home our daughter from Korea. We have two boys who were getting ready to start a new school year, and, here we were...Jobless...Stunned...Devastated...Hurting.

We were unsure of what tomorrow would look like, let alone our future.

It was only by the grace of God that I made it through the checkout lane and back home in one piece that day.

And it was only by the grace of God that we made it through the minutes and hours remaining in that dreary Thursday.

We had no words, no solutions and were just being introduce to the grief we would be working through for the days and weeks to come.

The fresh hope and joy we had felt when bringing Finley home had been broken.

Steve and I decided that night that our only choice was to show up. We would show up each morning, show up each afternoon, and show up each evening.  We would show up for God.  We would show up for each other.  We would show up for our three beautiful children.

We would sit in our brokenness, look for beauty in the brutal, and stay in the arena with our faces marred by dust, sweat, and blood. We would dare greatly, seek truth and fight each day against the lies.

Today, as I type, it has been forty days since our fresh hope and joy was shattered. We are still uncertain of our future.  Steve is still looking for a job.  But we are still showing up, broken, hopeful and waiting once again.