Look back and laugh!

I was glancing through someone's adoption blog the other day, the writing dating from the time before the infamous call, when their child finally came home.  She seemed rather distressed at others' use of the word 'exciting' to describe what her family was going through during the long, unpredictable wait.  Being now two years out from our second placement, I am almost a little wistful about that so-called excitement.  For nothing in life compares to the exhilaration of 'the call,' that moment you find out you are finally parents, it makes me almost want to go through it again, almost.  But this young lady does have a very good point, while excitement is certainly a part of it, the whole experience can hardly be summed up in that word.  There's so much of doubt, fear, worry, impatience, frustration, grief, and a hundred other emotions tied up with it that it is impossible to distill it down to one word.

I'm sure Frodo's flight from the Nazgul might have been considered exciting or the experience of a soldier in any given war, at least to those on the outside, those only hearing the tale; it is quite another creature altogether to actually be in the midst of it.  But even our own stories come to look that way in our own remembering thereof with enough time and distance.  Scripture tells us that the woman soon forgets the pain of her travail in the joy that a human being has been born into the world, and that concept applies to so many things in life, even the adoption process.  During the waiting, the doubt, the fear, the what ifs, the grief, the interminability, the frustration it seems like it will never happen, that you'll never be free of this endless swamp.  But whatever happens, eventually you look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, hopefully you laugh at yourself and how silly your impatience was, for in the end, the trouble was worth it, the struggle was not in vain for it was just another chapter in that great book called your life, which is but one minor volume in a great and boundless library, and that book but the introduction of an endless volume containing a story that will never end.  Like the children at the end of the Narnia series, they all look back and laugh, will we?  What's your story about?  Are you trying to write your own or is there a vastly experienced Author penning your tale?