I sat in a beach chair and cried. Not legit crying with sobs and shudders. It was subtle \u2013 the kind of crying where your tears just turn on, as if they were emotional garden hoses connected to a leaky spigot. With a book in one hand, I used the other to wipe away the stream of tears breaking past the rim of my big black sunglasses.<\/p>\n
The book told a story of adoption. More than that, really, it was a book about faith. And obedience. About helpless situations where one young woman did what she felt she was called, told, led \u2013 whatever you want to call it \u2013 to do to make a difference in her world.<\/p>\n
My two older kids played in the surf a little ways off. The little one crawled in the sand next to his dad. Sitting there, I wanted, I felt, I knew \u2013 whatever you want to call it \u2013 adoption to be a part of our family story.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to say, \u201cI support adoption\u201d or donate money to friends who are adopting. But it\u2019s an entirely different thing to look your husband in the eye after you\u2019ve put three healthy, beautiful blue-eyed-just-like-their-dad children to sleep in just as many bedrooms and say, \u201cWhat would you say about adoption \u2026 for us?\u201d And when he looks at you and says, \u201cI\u2019d say yes,\u201d (the answer you both hoped for and were afraid of) you don\u2019t know what to do next.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d love to tell you a story of how I pursued adoption beginning the very next day. How I relentlessly went after what God put in my heart. But I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Instead, I did nothing.<\/p>\n
For years.<\/p>\n
Adoption continually pulled at my heart, but fear \u2013 of the unknown, of affording it, of what it could do to our marriage and our children \u2013 paralyzed me into inaction.<\/p>\n
Looking at me, you\u2019d never know I struggle with fear: I\u2019m not a worrier, I don\u2019t have trouble falling asleep, and my house is a mess 90 percent of the time. (I\u2019m so completely Type B.) But I\u2019ve lived safe for so long, not wanting to rock the boat, so afraid of what it would look like and feel like to say yes to something bold and out of the norm.<\/p>\n
My mom died from cancer when I was 18. Seven years later, when Chris and I had been married for five years, he had brain surgery for a life threatening condition. Both events devastated me, although they had different outcomes. They shaped my life and led to a distant, hurt relationship with God. They led to fear.<\/p>\n
Even though I felt adoption was what we were supposed to be pursuing in this phase of life, I also felt a need to be protective \u2013 of my family and myself. I didn\u2019t want to open our life to more heartache, more trauma, more hard.<\/p>\n
Fear smothered the desire for adoption, strangled my ability to trust, and stifled my faith.<\/p>\n
When my third child was almost two years old, I took a class at my church on living life with purpose. Each week we addressed the truth of God\u2019s love for us, how our personal histories shaped us, and how each one of us has work to do.<\/p>\n
It was the first time as an adult I acknowledged fear\u2019s strong grip on my heart and realized its stagnant effects on my soul. Despite having an outwardly full life, I felt empty, scared and purposeless.<\/p>\n
At one point, we wrote down two things we\u2019d regret not doing if we found out we only had a certain amount of time to live. This scenario hit close to home; my mom was only 48 when she died and her diagnosis came just 10 weeks earlier. Without hesitation, I scribbled down writing and adoption on the paper.<\/p>\n
Instead of fear, I suddenly felt freedom. Instead of insecurity, trust. Instead of doubt, belief.<\/p>\n
My version of being gutsy isn\u2019t showy or sexy. It\u2019s not particularly adventurous or provocative. But it is believing I can trust God, trust myself, and boldly pursue what\u2019s in my heart. That I can step out in faith and obedience, knowing I\u2019m more than the fear, the failures, the inadequacies I so often see in the mirror.<\/p>\n
Whether it\u2019s adoption or writing, or whatever comes next, being gutsy isn\u2019t deciding to go after something I never thought I could do; rather, it\u2019s an ongoing trust that God can (and will) do something with me I know I couldn\u2019t do on my own.<\/p>\n
This year at the beach, I sat in a different chair and had a new book in my hands. Waves kissed my toes and my three older kids played in the waves. Viv, our youngest, adopted last winter from China, whose name means Life, collected shells near my feet. Grateful tears filled my eyes behind big dark sunglasses.<\/p>\n
Sonya Spillmann is a nurse by training and a writer at heart. She is a motherless mother from the DC area who writes for Coffee + Crumbs<\/em><\/a>. You can follow her on her blog spillingover.com <\/em><\/a>and on Facebook.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I sat in a beach chair and cried. Not legit crying with sobs and shudders. It was subtle \u2013 the kind of crying where your tears just turn on, as if they were emotional garden hoses connected to a leaky spigot. With a book in one hand, I used the other to wipe away the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259,"featured_media":6819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,42],"tags":[179,1374,212,297,1343,381,87,54,55,56,101,1318],"class_list":["post-6816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faith","category-lifestyle","tag-adoption","tag-beach","tag-courage","tag-faith","tag-gutsy","tag-hope","tag-love","tag-mama","tag-mom","tag-motherhood","tag-parenting","tag-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/259"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.themom.co\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}