Chucking the Picket Fence

As much as I love a spontaneous drive through the country or the occasional surprise birthday bash, at my core I am a pretty intense planner.  I've had goals and made plans since I was in first grade and wanted terribly to be picked to sing a solo in "All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth" (which I didn't get, btw).

From the age of fifteen, I planned to be married, with two children and one dog, own a home (preferably one with a white picket fence.)  And I wanted to have it all come to fruition by the magic age of 28.  Yep.  Big dreams, huh?  Well… I thought so anyway.

But then 28 came and went and all those things (except the picket fence) fell into place as if I had planned them myself.  I have all I had ever wanted.

Except that darn picket fence...

When Dustin and I share that we are adopting, people have asked us, "Why?  Again? Now?"  And when we first decided to adopt three years ago from Ethiopia we knew that it was a step away from the norm.  We were getting up the courage to throw away our proverbial picked fence.  We were ready to step into the unknown, off of our neatly manicured lawn that was wrapped up in a pretty, glossy white fence.

One slat at a time, we have begun to chuck the picket fence of our lives.  We are walking out into the sidewalks of our neighborhood and into the unknown, wild and sometimes scary place of parenting children that come from hard places.  We are choosing it.  Life could be easy and clean if I continued my maniacal planning but, honestly, chucking out the fence is so much more exciting!

I think often about what we are giving up by choosing to grow our family again.  Do I have enough patience for this?  Will the other kids suffer because my attention will need to primarily be focused on Jack in the coming months?  Where will all the money come from to pay for this ridiculously expensive process?  How will I get it all done - laundry, schooling, meals, cleaning?

And the answer to every question is I DON'T KNOW!  I am not ready.  I am never going to have it all planned out.  My life should get messy sometimes.  I don't need to plan everything because that leaves no room for God to move!  I want to hang on His every word and wait, with baited breath, for the next adventure He might take our family on.

Step by step, we watch for God to reveal Himself at work.  The more I step out of my planned existence, the more ways I see unexplainable miracles.  That is the life I really want and I'm even ok with not planning it out!

We are chucking that picket fence and learning to live the life He has always wanted for  us....Who  wants a picket fence when we could exchange it for  our cherub-cheeked little man?!