Little Fighter

Song of the month- Miracle: Foo fighters

It’s been almost two months since we brought our little miracle home from the hospital. Our Eden Hope, born at 1lb 2oz is now a whopping 9 1/2 pounds of poopin, spitin-upin, late night a cryin, baby fun….and we volunteered for this, even paid to do it! We fought through two years of bureaucracy, home studies, repeated home studies, failed matches, all to get to this little miracle baby.   There are a lot of lessons I’ve taken away from the adoption of our second girl.  But the main lesson is how to fight…right.

We call Eden “Our little fighter” or “Super Girl” because of all the hurdles she’s already managed to leap over. Collapsed lungs, brain bleed, threat of Cerebral Palsy, malformed eyes, hole in her lower back indicating possible Spina Bifida, you name it, she’s had it. You name it and she’s overcome it. I’m sure by next month she will help Apple overcome their post Steve Jobs slump. She’s a very capable micro premie our Eden. She’s a fighter, in the best sense of the word.

There are a lot of things we fight for in this life. We fight about politics, gay rights, unisex bathrooms…we fight over the toilet roll not being refilled, we fight over someone not loving us the way we need.  We fight because we are, after all… right.  Unfortunately, when we fight, we often lose because the right we started fighting for gets diluted in Ego.

Recently I got sucked into an online debate about a provocative sign some Christians posted in New York reading, “Dear our Atheist friends, thank God your wrong.” Both Christians and non Christians were fighting over the rightness or wrongness or goodness or badness of this sign. And so, feeling the blood under my skin begin to boil just enough to reach my fingertips, I piped in too. I typed in what I thought to be a very clever and balanced quip. I wasn’t going to be one of those on line angry people or bigots. Nope. I was going to tell everyone off for spending so much time fighting each other…then I unceremoniously used the word butthead…oops.  I make a perfect bigot.

The more I read, the more angry I got and the more I realized how much energy we as Christians (me included) spend on talking about what we DON’T believe in, or what we DON’T like, or WHO we don’t like and after talking enough and posting enough, we sit down after dinner to enjoy our favorite show. A show that most likely has all of what we DON’T believe in represented.  So What’s up with our little hypocritical selves?

We fight for the externals, maybe for the right reasons, but when we stand up as Christians, often it’s to yell at the outside of the cup. “Dang you cup, you’re filthy!”  The great deception is that if we can somehow get everyone to behave on the outside, then that will prove Christianity is alive and well. GONG!

If I always ran my Christianity fighting for the externals, I’d never have done half of what God has called me to do, and I definitely wouldn’t be a mother to the two most amazing girls…who, on the outside, look nothing like me.

Externally our little 1lb girl looked like a baby zombie, (our 4 year old’s words not mine…don’t ask me how she knows what baby zombies look like), but we called her Eden Hope because of the promises we know God is going to work in her.   Externally it looked like Eden wouldn’t be long in this world and if she did stay around, she’d have a poor quality of life.  But the external loses every time…so says my forty year old self…and God has a different plan for Eden than what we originally thought, and our little fighter is growing stronger every day.

You know how Eden fights? It’s pretty simple.  After squirming her way into the most cuddly position humanly possible, secure and loved, she offers up the sweetest smile.  Lord that smile! It fills my heart to bursting everytime time! I honestly don’t know how it’s possible after all the pain she’s gone through for her to still smile like that.

That’s when it hit me. That’s the fight I’m called to as a Christian. To bring people into a secure and loving relationship with God, a place of rest in the arms of their loving parent…with ALL of their so called disfunctions and pain. Everything I do, or don’t do should be defined by this, not by what they are on the outside. My fight isn’t about whether they love Obamacare or their same sex partner or Unisex bathrooms, or purple Kangaroos who promote all of the above. That’s not what I’m about and it’s definitely not what I want to be remembered for, or Christ remembered for.

Christ came and fulfilled the heart of the law and in the process stepped on a lot of the letters in the law. He literally had to die externally, and with him all his right views on things appeared to have died too.  And, had I stood at the base of that cross on that day, I would have been certain God was indeed dead.  I would have never guessed at the internal fight he was already winning for me. A fight that would mean I’d get to rest inside his arms and be called a daughter, forever…

God is love  and it’s going to take everything inside me to get that message across when inside I’m still so unloving, especially toward those who are just like me. Yep, just like me…buttheads.

So my challenge? Find someone who is totally opposite to my way of viewing things, and instead of trying to convince them I’m right and they’re wrong, find a way to express God’s heart of love toward her/im…..even if s/he looks like a baby Zombie.:0

…I got my hands on a miracle.