“Can these bones live?”
When we first pursued this second set of adoptions, I’d nearly forgotten my vision of a girl crawling to me across the bed. It wasn’t long after we were home and medical tests confirmed Lily’s age that I realized Lily was that toddler. She would have been one, just as I pictured her, at the time I saw her in my mind’s eye.
God gave me a window into the years I didn’t see, for just a moment. He seared my imagination with His, for me.
As we settled into our full house, my life’s question was not just for my story anymore. Our second adoptions had brought a child approaching a decade of pain without a mommy and a daddy. In her hunger, in her barrenness, in her waiting for healing, was He good to Lily?
Months before, I had received a portentous text message from a friend. We were a season away from leaving for Uganda to get Lily and Hope. We hadn’t even seen Lily’s picture yet or imagined who she might be.
I was climbing into bed, eyelids heavy. The adoption process we’d begun meant lots of late-night email correspondence and prayers in the wee hours of the morning. Like a woman whose body is preparing to introduce the world to her child, and her child to the world, I was attuned to any of the “baby’s” movements.
The text woke me up.
My friend in Virginia had sent verses, with little explanation. They were impressed on her for us. For now. For this child, or these children, who would soon be ours.
It was a passage from Ezekiel 37 that I’d read many times, but never in this light. God gave Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones and told him to speak life to them. This man of dust became man of God as he spoke what was not into being. The bones came together and gained flesh. They breathed, they received God’s Spirit, and they became warriors.
These words about Israel were also for me.
God said to Ezekiel, said to Israel, and whispered to me through my friend that night:
They indeed say, “Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!” Therefore prophesy and say to them, “Thus says the Lord GOD: ‘Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves.’ ”
— Ezekiel 37:11 – 12
Those bones were my children. Arid, barren, disconnected from their source, hopeless, but offered flesh by one word from a weak person representing a strong God.
I was called to be that weak one. Not only to believe but to speak His promises, despite what my eyes and my mind might tell me.
Weeks later, we learned of Lily. Months later, I held her for the first time.
She revealed herself, early on, as that dessicated valley of bones.
Her heart was waiting to be breathed upon. Emotional muscles present from birth, but without shape, had atrophied. Years spent existing, but not really living, had wearied her on the inside. And all of this bolstered my greatest fears.
Can He heal even her? Is she forever damaged?
Will these dry bones breathe?
She was starved, not even knowing she was hungry.
A week after Lily first came through those guesthouse gates, we took her back to visit the orphanage where she’d lived for years. We wanted her to have a sense of closure. We wanted to see where she had grown to be who she was so far.
I held her tight the whole way there, not knowing what a seven-year-old’s response might be to revisiting the life she once wore. I wanted her body to retain the marks of a mother’s arms as she reentered, for a few moments, the fields of the fatherless.
When we arrived at her orphanage, what seemed like one hundred children swarmed our boda bodas. She had been one of them, just days before, but she looked confused as she scanned the curious faces.
Soon, though, she found her friend, Stella, one of only two friends I’d heard her mention by name. I wondered, Is it typical for an orphan not to have many friends, or is this her survival mechanism to see people as indistinct, to not attach? She and Stella ran off together like carefree schoolgirls, which gave me time to take in the surroundings.
The children in the dirt yard played chase not much differently than those here stateside tramping around our Western outdoor candy lands. Their eyes danced and their mouths squealed. What is keeping them from paralyzing grief over their destitution? I could barely face it. But these little ones had no option to look away. They were living it.
The pain stung even more at the thought of Lily’s years lived so hungry while her mommy and daddy had abundance. Love ran free from the staff to the children, but those children’s bellies were empty.
One small child, with flies swarming around his face, approached us with a concoction he’d made in the lid of a plastic bottle. My friend who was with me, who knew the child well from her months in-country, took a whiff and said, “No more, not good to eat.”
What makes something good or bad to eat when you have no food?
I found Lily again — she’d seemed to recover a bit of herself — and asked her to show me her room. She’d forgotten where it was, though she had spent years in that bed. So Stella led us to the long, narrow dormer.
The dank space housed a corridor of beds, the path between the beds and the wall only wide enough for one person to pass. The cement walls were stained reddish brown with African soil, and the mattresses, some without sheets, sagged below wooden bunk frames. The thick smell of soiled beds and dirty clothes hung in the air. Only the door carved into a wall of cement afforded any light.
These living quarters were the intersection of childlike wonder and cold, hard loss. To Lily, this was now her past. To Stella, it was still her life.
I forced myself to look, to grasp at Lily’s history. Will her heart one day feel sick, as mine does now, over the gaps in her childhood?
Back home, I paged through Lily’s prayer journal and found a spring amid what appeared to be a mostly arid existence. Lily didn’t yet know who she was, but she seemed to know who did. She conversed with God in ways she couldn’t converse with me.
I cried when I found her request that we come before the courts closed, to wait with her while the judge said yes.
“Answer my prayers, oh God,” she wrote.
He did.
Now, with us, vacancy crept in behind her eyes during the moments when her sisters’ giggles or Caleb’s hugs didn’t distract her. She stood shocked by every experience we introduced. Riding our bikes to get ice cream, building sandcastles, and cuddling at bedtime all elicited the same stunned response. It was clear she couldn’t quite figure out how to fit her story into this new reality.
We took walks and read stories at night, and I held all of her tall, slender frame like she was a baby, praying for the right time to ask questions of her heart.
“It was good!” she said, many times, of her life before us. “Good” seemed to be the trap door between her head and her heart that had never been opened. There was little hint of her pain over her lost years.
“She’s delightful,” people told us again and again. And she was. She said and did all the right things.
But my mama’s eyes saw empty, saw hunger. Saw bones in need of flesh.
Lily and her friend, Stella — once bunkmates and classmates — became pen pals. Stella had shared most of Lily’s story with her. Together they knew a secret sisterhood of hollow years that few would ever understand.
Stella’s future held less promise than that of almost all the other children in the orphanage. She was close to aging out. What happens to the fatherless when society wants to make them young fathers and mothers?
Her letters to Lily months after the girls said goodbye revealed her world, her very small world. “The orphanage received new mattresses!” she bubbled. She wrote of educational advancement within the orphanage and school testing and food.
Then in one letter came a cryptic postscript. “P.S. God gave me the new name Sarah.” One small line, an afterthought.
I pondered this for months. Stella had innocently, almost matter-of-factly, accepted a name change from God. How did His words come to her — in prayer, in dreams, in play?
The orphan story is the extreme version of my pain — of our pain. Abandonment. Rejection. Loss. For some, a lifetime of loss. It is pain without an obvious answer, without an obvious explanation.
Children who live immersed in this pain grow numb to it. The flat expressions of many orphans is a reflection of being numb to hope as well. They know perhaps more than any of us that hope can be dangerous.
What does God say about that aging pain?
He says what He said to Stella.
He says, “Sarah.”
Not Sarai, her old name, but Sarah, a new name to signify the covenant, the promise that He held for her. She was now bound. To Him. Everyone who spoke her new name made homage to hope. His destiny became her destiny. Her barrenness was buried in His promise.
My thoughts about her — Abraham’s Sarah, or Lily’s pen pal across the ocean, or my former orphan down the hall — reveal my thoughts about Him. If He is healer to me, restorer of all that is broken, I will see her not by her present loss, her forever fragmentation, but as Sarah. As one promised. As one chosen to carry His seal.
The brokenness at my dinner table and the even starker darkness across the ocean invites a God who gives new names.
This is the God I want to know. The One who named her Sarah.
On our beach trip soon after we returned home, we were swimming in the ocean when a quick head count at the shore revealed that Lily was missing.
I scanned the beach, feeling panic rise in the back of my throat. Back and forth, my eyes darted from the houses, the dunes, the ocean at our feet. I finally spotted her a few hundred yards down the beach, walking away from us. I ran to catch up with her, no idea where she was going.
When I reached her with my arms (because even calling her name didn’t get a response), I saw that she was clutching her shoulder, stumbling over depressions in the sand. She didn’t want to tell me what hurt, but she couldn’t hide it. I finally pulled it out of her: she’d been stung by a jellyfish.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to respond. What child runs away from — not to — her mama when life hurts? Unlike my other children, she didn’t clasp hands around my neck and cry into my chest with the expectation that Mommy or Daddy always finds a way to fix everything. She went cold. Distant. Minutes before, she’d been splashing saltwater all over her siblings. In pain, she became a stranger.
Mommy wasn’t a healer in her story; Mommy was absent.
I saw myself in her. Even with these four beautiful ones in my home, I still waited for healing. I still longed. I still guarded myself, at times, against God’s no.
I know, child, I wanted to say. To ask for healing, for comfort, is dangerous. It’s vulnerable. It feels easier right now to be alone. But I want you to look into my eyes and learn who I am, when you are hurt, so that you can come to me first.
The lingering gaps in my life kept me close to God, as He wanted. As I wanted the chasms in Lily to keep her close to me. God never intends for us to ask, Who are You in this pain? only once. He wants us to make a habit out of coming near. Because His response to our pain will be safe.
Later I thought about my ache to hold Lily that day. I realized that if, at eighty, my body hasn’t known the healing of the Sarah who went before me those thousands of years ago, I will know that I pleased Him with a hope that kept me raw and vulnerable to His touch.
The barrenness I shared with my children would serve a purpose, a holy purpose. He wants us to run toward Him, in expectation, when we are stung.
“You’re a bad, bad mommy,” she said with her words, after hours of saying it with her scowls and her shoulder shrugs. Last night’s mommy-daughter time escaped her. Today’s cuddles and words of encouragement, forgotten.
It hadn’t taken long for this daughter to find enough comfort in our home to let what simmered, beneath, come up and out. Her pain was aimed at me: “I want to be in charge of myself!” Every word spoke two desires: Go away, abandon me like I deserve! and Please don’t leave me, Mommy.
I reached out for her chin, searched behind those eyes, dark with years of secrets, and said His tender words, imparted, “Your sin isn’t strong enough to push me away. Here is where my love for you grows. I will never stop loving you.”
Later, Nate whispered to me behind closed doors, “She’s no different than you once were, not too long ago.”
Then I saw: there is a beauty in getting to live your story twice.
Those years of hunger, perplexity, and pain could now be found in these four little former orphans under my roof. Could I reach down into their pain to call forth the kind of hunger God had given me? Could we be the ones to teach them that He fills our barrenness?
Adoption invited a partnership with God in which we could express the new dimensions of Him that He had been revealing to us. The Father redeemed our story with the breath of His Word and then allowed us to walk it out again, with them.
I wondered if Adam thought about this during those simple days of beauty in the garden. He had received the Father’s special benediction over his life (“it is very good”), and then he was invited to offer his own voice of blessing. He was even granted the privilege of naming his wife (Genesis 2:23).
As I began to see the shadows of my story in the hearts of my children, I lived my Father’s kindness to me once more. I received His Word, even as I offered my own voice to bring forth life.
For Your Continued Pursuit
Ezekiel 37:11 – 12 | Genesis 17:15 | Song of Solomon 8:6 | 2 Corinthians 1:21 – 22 | Isaiah 42:3 | Hebrews 11:6 | Isaiah 54:1 – 8