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Our Holy Chaos Adoption Update

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Our Holy Chaos attempts to find God amid our family’s ups and downs. Last month was more down than up, but God was still there. We have been pursuing the adoption of a boy from China since 2019. We were about a week from traveling to complete adoption when China shut down in February, 2020. We’ve been on a waiting roller coaster ever since. There has been good news and bad news, but we always expected that completing adoption of this little boy was a matter of time. Until last month. In early September, China announced that they were no longer processing international adoptions. Period. Our Department of State is asking for clarity and pushing for adoptions with a matched child—like ours and many others—to proceed to completion, but they are not optimistic. We’ve always known this was possible. On one hand, we consider this boy our son. His smiling face hangs on our wall alongside pictures of our other biological and adopted children. He’s one of us in all ways except geography and cit...
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Giving From Gratitude Not Guilt

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Everything felt right for the first time in a long time. I was 30,000 feet over Florida heading to a conference. The flight was smooth, I had been up since 2:45 that morning, and the cabin was quiet. Peaceful. Our second adoption from China was still a stressful roller coaster. My work still had issues that needed solving. My family was far behind me and my heart ached for them. But, I felt that God had these things under control. Gratitude filled me as soon as I noticed the feeling of peace. It was a gift. A strong desire to respond welled up in me. My mind started racing. I wanted to do something. Maybe I should write an article about the experience. Or I could contemplate how God was acting and what he wanted me to take away from the experience. Perhaps I could figure out how to make this feeling happen again when I felt stressed. Then I received another gift. A small voice asked me to let all of that go and just be grateful. My reaction was normal enough. When someone does somethin...
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Just Get Back Up

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The fog was starting to lift from my mind. Like a man waking in the middle of sleep walking, I came to my senses with disorientation and unease. A week earlier, a situation at work hit out of nowhere. My mind and thoughts were consumed with planning and trying to understand the bigger picture of what was going on. The situation lurked in the back of my mind with my family and in prayer. Nothing else seemed important but untying this work-related knot. The fog lifting was the dawning of the realization that I had fallen into the trap that an external reality was more important than my relationships with my family and with God. While my work situation was a big deal, it did not define me. No matter what happened there, it didn’t mean more than being present to my family. It certainly didn’t matter more than my soul. Problem solving was my first reaction to realizing my mistake. I ran the last several days back in my mind looking for what I could learn. How could I have prevented getting ...
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Three Steps to Deepen Your Prayer Habits

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The words of  Psalm 95  came to my mind as I stirred from sleep. That may sound like a holy moment, but I shook my head in frustration. Apparently I had to start over the first psalm of Morning Prayer for the third time! Prayer is one of those things that sometimes flows like a rushing river. It sweeps us away and we can barely stop it if we want to. Other times, prayer feels like the most lonely obligation imaginable, reciting pre-written words into the emptiness. Building a prayer life is neither easy nor automatic. Most mystics agree that God purifies our intentions by intentionally weaning us off of the pleasant feelings that prayer can give. He wants us to desire him, not the pleasure of resting with him. This is the explanation given when we inevitably leave prayer’s honeymoon stage and must decide what we will do when the road becomes harder. Like a married couple whose infatuation has worn off, prayer takes a turn where our faithfulness, sacrifice, and love blend into ...
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How to Build a Family Culture

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“Anyone up for a game?” I asked optimistically. It was early evening and I didn’t have anything pressing. What a good opportunity for some quality family time. No response. Everyone had settled into their own thing. Books, shows, and random household tasks. I shrugged and shoveled some laundry from the dryer into a basket. I could wait. A few minutes passed and my son wandered by and asked if I wanted to play some basketball in the driveway. I looked at the half-full basket of clothes and told him I just wanted to finish this. A few folded towels later I found him occupied in a video game. I figured if I couldn’t beat ‘em I’d join ‘em and picked the novel I was partway through. Another evening passed with a house full of individuals quietly missing each other. The culture of our family had eroded without my noticing. When our kids were small it was easy to spend time together. We had virtually everything in common. Our kids’ main social group were their siblings and parents. That’s not...
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How to be Plan While Trusting God

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The day started with a sweet cocktail of confidence mixed with eagerness to prove myself. Solving puzzles is a big part of any software developer’s job and I had the perfect opportunity to unravel an issue that would make a big difference for my team and our customers. I had the experience, tools, and the time, a day with few meetings, to get it done. The day ended with the bitter taste of hours spent on fruitless tests and theories. I walked away from my desk defeated and spent the evening hours in a sullen funk questioning my skill and value. Why do so many things in life demand all we have to give while still remaining outside our control? God asks us not to worry about providing for our needs (see Mt 6:25), but doesn’t tell us what unexpected expenses are waiting down the road. We are to take care of our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Cor 6:19) but no amount of diet and exercise can guarantee good health. If we don’t try, God will let us fail. But, if we do try, we...
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Appreciating Your Spouse's Differences

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Anger cut through me like a knife. It was the middle of the night—technically, the morning—and our new puppy woke me up by making a huge mess. Without getting into details, she obviously ate something that didn’t agree with her and I was convinced the smell would never come out of the carpet. The injustice dominated my thoughts. I didn’t want a dog, much less a puppy. It was my wife Tara’s doing. Yet, there I was cleaning the carpet while my wife blissfully slept the night away. A few days later, Tara and I had our end-of-month finance conversation. If that sounds boring, then you’re like my wife. She hates it. During the conversation, Tara reminded me that tracking expenses and talking about money is something she does for me, not her. It was disheartening to hear. I didn’t want her to do anything to placate me. I wanted her to choose to care, even though it’s not her thing. You probably noticed the hypocrisy faster than me. Here I was holding onto my image as a guy who has no time or...
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