Fourth of July when I was six meant emptying out jars of last year’s fireflies only to catch them anew at my grandparents house by the river.

My children get a second chance at what was my childhood normal. Innocence was summer’s musk for me and it is, now, for them, too.

My former-orphans wear flip-flops with flower appliques and madras shorts and big bows in their hair. They ride bikes and climb trees and weed the garden for the day’s “Team Hagerty” task. They have tea parties underwater and sport goggles that I sometimes think might leave a permanent ring into the fall, they’ve been on so long.

They dress themselves up in normality.

And I forget.

Until she melts down, just shy of an hour before we’re to leave and meet new friends for dinner — all those years of insecurity mustering themselves up into one deadpan expression. She goes under and I go with her. Not sure whether to press pause on the plans (as we’ve done so many times before) or press ahead, I get stuck in my thoughts.

We’ve made our home her cradle, a place where her still-infant heart can beat, and bleed. She can cry safely here. Her body jumps multiple sizes in one season, but her heart moves only inches towards healing. Healing – real, lasting healing takes time.

I know this.

I think.

I knew this, once.

“This is what we signed up for,” Nate tells me in an effort to pull me out of the pit.

When I start to believe that the Christmas card we sent out — the snapshot of our “finest hour” when all clothes are pressed, nails are scrubbed and smiles are vibrant — is truly our most glorious moment, I lose sight of all that fills up my insides.

Our God was birthed onto straw and soil.

And He calls us to another way. A better way.

“But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” Matthew 14:13-14

When I expect to be repaid, no matter how subtle, my insides wither. Repayment, like that night when she crumbled, would have been a child whose countenance shouted “I am loved” despite her history and whose mommy could count on her to be steady. Other times, with the rest of them, it’s “beating the odds” and matching up, normal, against children who didn’t know loss before they lost their first tooth.

But I was made for another reward.

As were you.

One that can’t really be marked by the naked eye, and may even go undetected by even the most discerning eye. And when I wrangle this life of mine in an attempt to fit it into another mold — the mold whose greatest glow shines externally — I miss the beauty of what happens underground. The beauty He intended all along.

Isn’t this the message for all mothers, for all people who have found themselves buried — hidden — under circumstances that just aren’t repaying us for the sweat we’ve shed?

It isn’t a consolation to not be repaid, it’s a prize.

The craving for a reward, in and from them, is not wrong. It’s merely displaced. We were made for a deeper heart connect that comes from the secret validation that no one can ever take from us. We subtly crave repayment from the one we’re fighting to love, but that circumstance was aligned mostly to reveal our own hunger for a living-touch from the One loving us.

And our life is a series of God-initiated circumstances which awaken us to the reality that our greatest reward is birthed into dirt.

My lot just happens, today, to be adoption — and all the delayed healing that comes after it. The place where you lack reward may be elsewhere. The scenery changes but the effect is the same. He is using this feast in our home to teach my flesh, that thinks it craves normalcy, what I was really made to crave.

Only Him. 

Even the greatest goal of my motherhood — and trust me, I still have them and hold them dear, these prayer-goals of mine for our home — falls grossly short of the one pursuit that may mess up my outsides but set me free on the inside.

When she looks down after I tell her I love her or her sister weeps in loss for another mother that’s not me, I feel His hand on my shoulder. When the one who came into our home at the youngest age (the one who wasn’t “supposed to have these issues”) has the deepest heart fissures, God leans in to me. Gentle. Tender. Knowing. He brushes my skin with a holiness so “other” yet so mine because of who He is, always, and who I have become in this vulnerable moment.

And I remember.

My payment is Him. A love that rushes in over my senses and expectations of a neat-and-tidy life on this earth and lifts me into another realm.

And He — this God-Man who has seen my squandered moments and my heart’s vomit and continues to reach in, not away — is an endless invitation. He is extravagant.

It’s this reminder that produces another “yes” in me for tomorrow.

If my days are going to be won by His Words, my end can never be the people I serve or the party I throw.

My end must be Him.

Him alone.

First three photos compliments of Mandie Joy. Third photo compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography.

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I am a newbie on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

My heart dropped into my stomach. It was as if I’d lost nine years’ work in nine seconds. Back again to newlywed – nearly heart-dead from crafting schemes to win him to my ways. All so that I wouldn’t have to trust.

“Now?” I said. Although my four-page trip prep checklist was nearly completed, we still had no sign of a court date. And the Ugandan courts closed July 15^th (just a three short weeks away) for the summer recess. If we went now, we chanced staying months in-country and breathing in all the emotional and financial expenditures that come from raising a family of four (or six) in temporary living quarters.

So I grilled him.

Why now? Where did this thought come from? Is this direction from God or just a boyhood craving for adventure?

Woman reverted back to girl, as if my wedding dress were freshly boxed. I looked at him  as an opponent seeking to rob my security, more than the proven ally he was.

Nothing about adoption is safe.

We sign papers and write checks and make mental timelines as if any part of this process is secure, and then are shocked when the battle waged in the heavenlies over these childrens’ lives intersects the natural and becomes our reality.

The fields of the fatherless are war-stained.

So when Nate made his suggestion to do the unconventional, and put my family of four on a plane with such uncertainty at its destination, I momentarily forgot what I signed up for. He’s crazy, I thought, as if even choosing to “disrupt” our steady-lives with the entry of two more – out of the birth order and past the years where pain can hide behind memory loss – was not crazy, even by my own standards.

So we got on our faces. Me, asking for confirmation. Him, balancing the certainty of what he thought we were to do and his wife’s faint heart.

Hours sitting in this pending decision revealed truth.

This had little to do with the outcome and everything to do with the weak walls I’d erected around my heart.

Here we go again.

The age-old story of our marriage came back to the same fault line. Trust. I had spent half a decade building a case around why the boy who came into my life at twenty-two, now man, was still unworthy of my greatest heart’s expression. I spent the other half-decade warding off supporting arguments for that case, often unsuccessfully.

Defense was never His intended position for my marriage.

So He gave me opportunities to advance. To take real ground. To see the strength in the man I was given, in the same way He sees the beauty in this weak-hearted woman who was his bride. To call me out of stale patterns of thinking and into the enchantment that is marriage — offered for every marriage, not just the perfected one.

Because really, every issue in my marriage can find its source in a brokenness between me and my heavenly Father.

Six days and ten bags later, we left. Our lawyer said “don’t come.” Our agency advised strongly against it and my insecure heart chose to follow the lead of the man He had given me. I’m pretty sure I had missed many dress rehearsal opportunities to practice trust, but something inside of me said it’s not too late.

The stakes were high but the wee hours of the night revealed a little girl’s heart who longed to unclench her fists and fall deep into the safety of my Daddy.

I was created to trust – to trust in a way that would stretch every part of my natural proclivities until my life becomes more about the unseen than the seen.

Our lives aren’t intended for natural.

And my Father didn’t make a mistake when He gave me a man so other that He would challenge my most guarded methods of self-preservation. When trust is given permission in a heart, all bound up like mine, His love expands on my inside.

I grow when I trust, unnaturally.

In the five weeks which proceeded from our last minute jump on a plane, I saw arguably more of the holy hand of God than in all of my life up until that point. Mountains fell into the sea and the waters were parted before us. He made us Israel and our children the descendents of history-made.

We returned a family.

And I came home forever-changed.

We stepped off the international flight which bridged the ocean between my children’s birth-country and their new home, battle-scarred and ragged, yet into a newness in Him I’d not known before.

All because Nate said yes when the Lord said go.

All because He gave me a man who would patiently lead me off the precipice of my fears in order that I might have an encounter with trust.

All because He mercifully dismantles the walls we put up between us and Him … and is unrelenting about revealing Himself in and through the parts of us that cower in fear.

He has made me for a trust that will, in no way feel natural or normal, but is holy. He has made me for a freedom-cry I’ll never release until I relinquish my grip on self-preservation and lean into His unseen as the most secure place in my life.

And He sent me a man to invite me there.

Though your cliff may be different than mine, Father’s day is for sifting through what seems to be the crazy parts of them and celebrating that they lead us and our children to where we wouldn’t otherwise go.

(Yes, that’s to His feet.)

Now, mamas, go celebrate those whom you’ve resisted, with those children of yours in tow. And pray for God to do more of this holy unraveling that is leading you to trust. They were designed by God for this very-now moment. In you.

 First and second photos compliments of Mandie Joy.

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I am a newbie on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

[Post updated and edited from the archives.]

I had one of those today, interrupting my mundanity.

One of my littles was struggling again with that same old lie. I see it in her body before her words ever speak it — she slouches when it haunts her. Her eyes half-shut under the weight of those eyelids, hiding her.

Shame is her food: not as good as her siblings, never was as good as her siblings, never will be as good as her siblings. Bad, bad, bad is the tagline of this lie.

So here we were again, sifting through it all — her sifting, me wanting to lift up her little eyes.

Her sister snuck into the background of our conversation, just as we started praying, with this one phrase — my still-frame moment.

“He’s making you new!” she declared with a fire in her eyes, and something clicked in the one in my lap.

When she had moved beyond bad, bad, bad to describe herself, I noticed the phrases she used weren’t her own, they were learned. Mimicked. She’d overheard this same sister in the room saying those very things, about herself, months and years earlier and she was trying them on for herself.

But today there was a different word over both of them — the one who declared it and her sister, who heard it.

My girls were being re-written.

She may not have been able to recall that He spoke this first in His Word — in Revelation 21:5 or 2 Corinthians 5:17 — about them and about Him, but now it was lodged her language. It was hers, to own, that came first from Him.

+++

Words fill my day.

By 8:15pm, I’m near-crawling up the stairs to tuck them in bed, not on any sort of guard over what might happen between when my feet leave the first-floor hardwoods and hit their worn, old bedroom carpeting. In those short few minutes, I not only hear it, but swallow it: the list of all I missed in just this one day.

She wanted to talk, heart-level, and I brushed her off to keep cleaning. I ignored the prices at the meat counter and walked away with $50 steak for one single night, unknowingly. I barked orders after dinner in lieu of patient training. And I didn’t even finish washing her sheets from this morning — what bed will this child sleep in tonight?

Those few minutes were loaded with words, all aimed at [continue reading over here ---->]

Out with friends and back home before too late, His Word was my nightcap.

It was summer love.

I can still feel, now, how my heart quickened when I opened those fresh pages. Those Words were for me, for just that moment. He was as thick as the anticipatory night air always is in June.

He was love.

He waited for me to come meet with Him in that time just like I waited for Him. Before I learned the vernacular, I talked to God. Many times without words. Only the stars witnessed our silent communion as He peeled back the sky for me. His Word was alive, a garment around this God-Man.

And I couldn’t get enough.

But the pace of life and the world’s demands on a heart began to allure my eyes elsewhere. I assumed, subconsciously, that companionable love was intended to eventually overtake the giddy-heart-racing kind of encounter I had with Him that summer before I got my driver’s license.

So it did.

But that wasn’t the last time the stars saw this little girl, giddy.

+++

Just shy of twenty years later, states away, but under that same thick-with-the-promise-of-summer-love June sky we scooted our five dollar foldable chairs out from the garage and onto the porch. The two mature trees in our front yard hid us from suburbia.

It was just us, Him, and the stars that night.

We paced and talked and prayed, considering the most seemingly foolish decision of our lives. And we laughed at where our crazy lives had taken us, to middle America with half our family asleep under our roof and the other half playing the day away in African dirt on the other side of the world.

The adventure of it all came back to me those nights before we got on a plane to Uganda. I remembered. I signed up for a love that would stretch and prod and pull at the very core of me. I wanted to be changed and challenged by a God whose love would expand inside of me as I grew in years.

I wanted vibrant love, no matter the outward expression.

The summer I was fifteen it was me and the Man, wrapped in His Word. The summer in my early thirties it was me, my husband and the God-Man calling me to take the biggest plunge of my life.

Falling in love with Him has many doorways. He’s creative to reach our hearts.

But several of the summers sandwiched in between those two mile-markers were hard and dry and lonely. For more than a handful of them, I had forgotten that His love was alive and actively-at-work pursuing me. I had forgotten how “other” this love of His was.

We didn’t start with a rush only to fizzle out and settle in to being merely partners, companions, sealed by a handshake. But something in the back of my mind led me to believe that complacency was normal and that God had only enough material to keep me enraptured for a few years, not a lifetime.

I told the story of that first summer for many years thereafter.

Until He gave me a new story to tell.

+++

Our God is actively pursuing the parts of me that I think no one sees (sigh. Love at its finest?). His love, at times, could be called violent against my world’s inertia that feels so prone to everyday complacency (read: boredom) in Him. No part of Him is boring — in fact, quite the opposite. He is seeking to enliven my boring heart.

Might this be the summer you fall in love? Again?

It is for me.

The calendar turns June and my heart is practicing the habit of expectancy. Bare feet and tan lines, outdoor ice cream parlors and sprinklers are only a shadow of what He has in store for me this summer.

This is the summer He’s ordained to meet with me. And the summer He’s ordained for me to fall, further, in crazy love with Him.

Join me?

Here are just a few ways to lean in to that expectancy:

• Close the blinds and turn up the music. Worship. (This one has been recently cranked in our house.)

• Put in your earbuds and break the morning with an extra-long walk through the woods. (I’ve resurrected this one for summer nature walks. So good.)

• If you’re in the throws of something thick, read His stories of beauty emerging from pain, written on people. Read good and beautiful writing of those who are seeking and finding Him, anew.

• Talk to Him. Often. “Tiny prayers” is the phrase we use around here. My day is won back from the grasp of worst-case-scenario thinking in minutes, not hours. All throughout my day I am seeking to see Him as He really is, infused into it. I pray this (below) for my heart — up the stairs and over laundry, one letter at a time. (Some days I pray this tailored version for my children, too.) Sometimes I make it through every letter in a whole day and in others I’m stuck-steady on just one for days:

• And for those under your roof needing restoration (including yourself) is one of my favorites. A little direction for praying restoration, through His Word, day-by-day for those broken hearts. Slide it into a plastic sleeve and pin it up on your bathroom mirror or carry it with you in your car:

• Finally, adore Him. Perspective is won by looking up, at Him. And our lives are won in the minutes, not the hours. Three minutes more today, given to saying His Word back to Him in your own words, means days won back over the course of a year. It’s not too late to jump in with us for June, below. Thanks to some more-savvy-than-me friends, we even have an adoration square for each day on Instagram. Adoration is awakening love in me. I can’t help but invite you to join me. (New to the concept of adoration? Add this quick read to your summer reading list.)

Sweet Mandie Joy took the chicken-scratch from my moleskine journal and made it beautiful in these prayer pages. Hop over here for a full list of prayer tools and blog-post printables.

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I am a newbie on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

First photo compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography. Second photo compliments of Mandie Joy.

I can’t wait to have tea with that old college housemate who stopped me on my way up the stairs as I passed by her room with this: “You say everything’s fine — all the time. But it can’t be.” I skirted her observation, wrapped my response – your observation is wrong — in christian-ese and went on my way.

But I found out years later that she was right.

And another went like this: we were headed out of town and this mentor, this friend, met me and Nate for breakfast before we scooted. He gently quizzed me on my second year’s work in a new town (which had me exercising new muscles), and read right through my words to my heart. Peppered throughout the analysis of my year was my mention of various people who’d placed varying levels of expectation upon me, or so I thought. I couldn’t bear up and I felt it. Something needed to change, was what I said. But what I meant was that they needed to change — all of them, this collaborative yet unconnected group of people who were forcing me to turn the treadmill up.

Except it was my hand on the controls of that treadmill. And my interpretation of their actions.

They didn’t need to change. I did. I was “headed for burnout,” said this friend, boldly. Something on my insides was off and I wouldn’t be the marathon runner I wanted to be if I kept racing through my long-runs.

I left breakfast in a fog, unsure of what to make of all this. His words resonated, slightly, but they didn’t match my understanding of Christianity. There was so much of His work to do … wasn’t I supposed to maximize my daylight hours for His kingdom? My days are numbered, why would I want to waste them? 

And what was burnout, anyways?

That breakfast was portentous, I learned, soon enough.

Months later, my bone-tired heart went belly up. I didn’t heed this friend’s words, I lived them.

There’s no time for planning when you’ve run dry.

I was forced to find rest.

+++

Rest, at twenty-three, was reading books and taking walks and holing myself up in my room for long-hour stretches with just worship music and my Bible. It was re-introducing myself to a God-Man I’d said yes to years before and for whom I had been working my fingers to the bone (or so I thought), but whom I barely knew.

I was beginning to accept life as a search, not a place to declare the “end” I’d found.

My twenties went from my self-declared decade of impact to years where the only heart I sought to impact was His. It was as if — because I couldn’t get my mind around the notion that He loved me not for what I did but for who I was — He allowed almost all of my external “doing” to wither so that I might find that sparkle in His eye when I was at my most seemingly-unproductive for His kingdom.

It took years for me to begin to see that He loved me in my closet and delighted in me during my most “inefficient” years.

And the glory of a pursuit of Him, lived across seasons, is that here I am again.

My heart has grown, my externals have changed, but there are still layers of understanding His rest to be had in my person.

Now, He is the man sitting across my breakfast table encouraging me to find Him in my unproductivity.

+++

This baby, inside, ripens while he drinks of the energy I once had. My body, producing less-than-ever by my standards, is sustaining a life not yet seen. And my to-do list goes unchecked.

The needs of a once- 1 & 1/2, 3, 5 and 7 year old grow as they grow. They crave back rubs and to sit on my lap over long books and to rest in my arms as their little hearts ponder their big stories. They ripen under my time. And my to-do list goes unchecked.

So, those free hours (because, mamas, when it all boils down we do have free hours) — they allure me. Make more lists, they say. Clean the corners and dust the edges and bake-up more homemade bread. Sometimes they say clear your inbox or meet a need or scan the caverns of internet pages, mindlessly.

And some days I listen to them. A productive day is one where everyone got mommy-time and my lists were all checked, where we loved not just ourselves but the hurting-world around us  – and our floors were clean, too. Right?

By this definition, productivity is elusive. Who could ever get there? Yet I subtly believe that I can.

I ask, then, what is His definition of productivity? How do you want me to pattern my days, Lord, when dishes and laundry and hearts-needing-shaping tug at the hem of my life?

There is a rest in Him, available to me, that supersedes seasons and the needs in font of me.

To choose rest — true rest, not the “rest” this age of ours says is rest, when the work is finished but the alerts inform us and feeds scroll before us — is to say, with our lives, that who He is matters more than what we perform or who we know down here.

To choose true rest is to believe that beauty often happens outside of what I create with my own two hands. And if I really believe this, then my most productive days may be the ones that include long walks and unfolding conversations with Him (not just quick asks) and candles lit in the afternoon to remind me there is more of Him to be had, here, right smack-dab at 3pm on Monday.

Practically, for me, it means my cobwebs might not be dusted when you come by and I may not be loading my kids in the car to drop a meal off for a friend down the street.  I may take days, rather than hours, to respond to your emails and take-out may be a must over “from scratch” some days. She may go a day too long without a shower and he may wear the same clothes twice in a row, all so that I can carve out pockets of this new productivity.

But something you might see in the house of the one who has found that hard-to-reach place of resting in Him when their hem is tugged, as you step over the bikes in the yard and lift your eyes from the smudges on the glass, is the light of a wild love in their eyes.

Those who look to Him are radiant because they need not wear their accomplishments as their garments.

They just wear the One at whom they’ve been looking.

I have eighty-some years on this earth. There will always be work to do and lives to save. The lists won’t ever stop, always something crying “urgent” at my door.

But when I reach the end of this life (one that has been staged to prepare me for eternity), will I hand Him my personal CV of all I accomplished for Him, or crawl in His lap because He is just that familiar to me? I want to know the scent of His skin. Now.

Weakness is key in His upside-down kingdom and true rest in Him, when there is work to do and lives to save and people to meet, is foolish.

I want to live His kind of foolish rest and let my days, then, be the overflow.

Keeping it real: Friends, I’m tempted to add a dozen caveats that say “care for the orphan”, “don’t forget the hurting”, “your children are not be neglected” while you practice this rest, but something tells me the majority of you, like me, already have that ticker tape running strong across your brain. We are honing in on the outward expression of a life lived for Him, but His precious church — like me — is starved for underground, radical devotion to Him. When the first thing comes first — eyes, up, on Him and body, rested, in who He is — we might just see the world turn upside down, all through the overflow. Because sitting at his feet, like Mary, really is radical devotion these days.

For Your Continued Pursuit: Psalm 20:7 | Hebrews 3-4 | Psalm 23:1-3 | Song of Solomon 2:14 |Psalm 34:5 | Luke 10:38-42

First through sixth photos compliments of Mandie Joy. She’s also taken the chicken-scratch from my moleskine journal and turned it into this June Adoration prayer guide.

 [Daily adorations are also on instagram.] Seventh photo compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography.

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I just took the plunge and am on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

Just before he flipped his blinker, I told him.

“I have to talk to you about something,” I swallowed, in an attempt to force my heart back down from my throat.

“I have a problem,” I eked out and paused — but not long enough to give myself chance to consider retracting my lead-in. “All I want to do is be with you.”

He subtly accelerated through that traffic light.

I was more than outside of my comfort zone, I was outside of myself. Though he’d professed much more than this towards me days earlier I still didn’t feel safe with my own emotions, whether they were expressed out-loud or felt, within. Something in recent years had taught me that emotions were risky.

But that rationale wasn’t enough to outweigh the new warmth that had been taking over all sense I had, as I realized that another not only knew me, but loved what he knew. We had been just friends — post-graduates stuck in a college town that became a ghost town in the summer. So I’d let him in, unsuspecting.

I let go of the vigilance I practiced around those outside my inner-circle and just was who I was.

Apparently he liked what he saw, even when the thread hung out and something in me responded to that very thing.

We spoke few words that luminous night, neither of us wanting to break this new porcelain revelation. Though when my hand accidentally brushed his leg and I felt the electricity of two lives that I now knew had been long-intended to be one, I still rested mostly on one simple reality: I was comfortable in my skin around this man. He was beginning to know me. And he loved what he knew.

+++

“I just don’t want to pray,” this child of mine cried. Cried out. There was youthful agony in those words. Five year-olds have no felt need to put on airs.

Over days and weeks came the same phrase, at different promptings. My little one was wrestling. It was almost as if this one was waiting for opportunity to express the inner-conversation and see just exactly how Mommy and Daddy might respond.

As we prayed, ourselves, seeking to understand the resistance in this child, a few pieces became clear (because isn’t it always just a few pieces? He is made for being sought, inch by inch) with one resounding theme.

Whether 5 or 55, who wants to talk to a God they believe to be mostly disappointed in them?

Abandonment leaves a sting. Some of our little ones still walk, pained. Adoption, to them, isn’t that a mommy and a daddy flew across the ocean to wrap them up in love but, instead, that a mommy and a daddy left them in need of another’s love.

They can’t yet put words to what we see when we look behind their eyes, but the symptoms are there.

“I just don’t want to pray,” says the five year-old who hasn’t even yet been trained by the current of a culture that speaks that same thought with their actions but rarely with their words. And I think towards this child: when what you can make of God is that He very well must have been displeased with your toddling self to leave you parched-mouthed and bone-thin, of course you wouldn’t want to talk to Him.

When prayer becomes lists and check boxes and pure-and-only discipline* (the physical response of a Christian who thinks they should pray but really doesn’t want to pray) – drudgery — it’s time to look under the hood.

+++

“All I want to do is be with you” was the phrase first practiced when I was twenty-two and treasured by one who I’d let see my foibles. I could breathe with Nate, exhale all of who I was. He was safety to me. It never was a chore to talk to Nate, less because of who he was and more because of how he saw me. Even when the worst parts of me were exposed.

But marriage is only a shadow.

On the days when the Truth of who God is speaks louder than the dozens of lies about Him that I might fight in my mind, all I want to do is be with Him. Because, that love — the love of Jesus —  it knows me. He enjoys that I slow my car anytime I see a hawk perched on a wire and when I make up songs from scripture and sing off-key over laundry.

His thoughts towards me are endless; my Maker, He studies me.

He laughs when I laugh and takes pleasure when I look up at Him. He feels, towards little me.

Though I am mother and wife and writer and cook and wear a hundred different big-girl hats, I am still His little girl. There is always a place on my Daddy’s lap for me. On my worst of days where my tongue is sharp and my heart has been iced, He treasures me.

How could I not talk to this God? Often. (How could I not inhale His thoughts towards me and towards Him, in, and exhale this Truth over my life? Often.) 

And soon, I know, my child will know this.

Our hearts are dull, not for lack of beating ourselves into a submission of will for getting through that prayer list, but because we don’t yet know what He cherished about us today.

In this one hour.

In this one minute.

Prayer can become as beautifully unconscious as breathing, an ongoing thread of conversation. It is the expression of a life that says: I am so known by this God-Man that all I want to do is be with Him.

*Note: Habit is the bone structure for all of life for both child and adult. Discipline plays a beautiful and necessary role in forming habits in little fingers and grown-up hearts — it’s a must for life. But for my little one I ever-so-gently encourage the sowing into that habit of prayer while recognizing, out-loud and in my own conversations with God, the fact that habit, alone, cannot sustain real relationship.

The prayer lists I slide into my plastic sleeve and carry around my house (you can find some of them here) are a staple, but when they become just words and I find my mind trailing and seeking escape in places other than just talking to Him it’s time for me to ask “where has my perception of You, God, been skewed?”

When I know I’m delighted in, all I want to do is be with Him.

For Your Continued Pursuit: Psalm 139:18 | 2 Samuel 22:20 | 1 Thessalonians 5:17 | Romans 12:12 | Ephesians 6:18

First, second, third and fifth photos compliments of Mandie Joy. Fourth photo compliments of Lucy O Photo.

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I just took the plunge and am on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

Disclaimer: though the title could be, perhaps, inflammatory — my sweet husband loves this post. It is written with permission .

We sat at a local favorite and it was all new to me. I had flown in for a weekend interview and knew nothing of how pregnant this little town was to be with the future of my heart. Conversation was easy and the third person brought in to interview me acted as if he were a rubber stamp.

I wasn’t nervous, but he asked one question of me that I knew I didn’t answer right.

“Describe to me a time you’ve failed. Big.” he said casually, as if I’d be quick to retrieve an answer. Little did this stranger know that I’d patterned my life against failure and twenty-two years wasn’t yet enough time for me to learn you can only keep that up for so long.

I didn’t have an answer for him. I stumbled over my words, trying both to process his question and answer it. Was failure something I needed as a selling point? Could this random guy read that I was hyper-sensitive to doing the wrong thing, at any given time?

I got the job, but never forgot the question that hung ominously over me.

This same weekend, while on a tour of my soon-to-be new city, I met his picture before I met him. Big southern-boy bow tie and a smile to match, worn by the man who would inaugurate me into both failure and love and teach me with his life just how intertwined they were.

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We were quite a collision and it took years to sort out. I lived careful, studied. I memorized the rule book and didn’t diverge much from it. Somewhere between those carefree days of pigtails and bicycle-handle-streamers-flying-in-tandem-to catch-up-with-my spit-fire-energy-level and my adult life I’d developed a fear of failing which drove me more than I recognized. When I came to know God, personally, I just fit Him (or what I perceived Him to be) into my already-formed perspective. We all run together against failure, right? Wasn’t this the Christian life — turning up the treadmill more just when you thought you peaked?

Nate, on the other hand, colored outside the lines. He didn’t practice perfection, he just was who he was, and the normal immaturity wrapped up in so many twenty-two year-old’s like himself didn’t seem to bother him, like it did me.

He lived in the moment and I lived anticipating the moment, preparing for the moment and analyzing that moment back there when it was all over.

But as time went on, his immaturity hit those common, God-ordained roadblocks that make a man out of a boy and an alarm sounded within me. I had begun to tolerate small measures of “failure” in him, trying not to stew but not really knowing what to do with the disappointment I felt at who he yet wasn’t.

But when his mess got bigger and others started to see it, I got angry.

The one sliver of beauty in anger (any anger) — if we can see it — is that it reveals the idol around which we’ve bent our life.

My perfect world was disrupted by a man who, many days, served as my reminder of a covenant and promise I never thought I’d actually need to lean into in order to stay. I’d spent years scaling this wall of don’t-ever-screw-up!, only to be attached to someone who didn’t seem terribly irritated by failure. Which was good, because he was getting better at it.

So what do you do when your idols crumble?

You fall in love.

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The rule-follower in me kept spinning new ways to clean him up and new ways to climb right out of this hole. Again, it was learned nature: avoid failure at all costs.

But we could only avoid that place of desperation – he in his failings and me in my impotent ability to reach him there — for so long.

His failings were both big and small. And they are his story to tell. But my version goes something like this:

I scrambled throughout most of my adult life subconsciously trying to avoid the chasm that seemed to exist between me and God when I “failed Him.” I had no experiential grid for who He was in my failure because, for much of my life, experience was the grid through which I saw Him. His Word and His whisper didn’t shape me, then. Instead, soundbites from sermons and my own contrived ideas of Him — filtered through my broken experience — left me unable to see who He was when I was anything less than my version of perfect.

So I worked hard not to fail. And there was not much conversation between me and my God.

Until I began to see Strength hiding inside a broken gait.

I saw him scrape his knees, over and over again, tripping over the same pothole. He fell and got back up, fell and got back up. In that same darn spot. I had a covenant, but many might have tired of this. His heart was earnest —  it became clearer over time that what lay beneath the surface was beating, heavy — but the inertia of his life was taking its time to align with his intentions. The hinderance that had wrapped itself around his ankles didn’t disappear in a one-time breakthrough, it was cast aside over days that became months that became years of a long and steady walk with eyes on the Man who became His strength.

This bothered me for a long time, the length it took to see healing and freedom in him.

Until I realized that this was glory.

God wasn’t just putting humpty-dumpty back together again, He was initiating me to His love.

And He was revealing Himself, powerfully, in my husband’s life and story.

Where I was impatient, God tenderly applied balm to Nate’s scrapes and bruises (note: from his own falls and failings!). C’mon, little guy, He said. You and me, we’re a team — you bring the failure, but I bring the strength. Where I had eyes on what he was not, God had eyes for who He was, inside of Nate. Where I counted life by days and months, God counted it by years and decades. I saw a few days of a seeming “no” in Nate’s life, yet God marked him by the “yes” residing in his spirit and called that month a win. He spoke tenderly and consistently about what Nate was becoming and I was still stuck on that from which he had come.

Nate had a brush with the Father’s love in his failure — that outward failure I’d so vehemently fought to avoid. He’s been forever marked by that brush.

It’s here that I begin to wonder if this whole story was more about God and me than it was about Nate.

I had cleaned up the outside and, though my sin may not have been as apparently mud-stained as his, my heart needed a true definition of love.

Nate showed me this.

Friends, I missed years in there — a thousand different chances to partner with God’s work in making the boy I married into this man, burned with the understanding of where his strength came from — because I didn’t believe that failure in the life of a man who is willing to repent is the beginning of his real taste of Life. And the beginning of mine.

I held more tightly to my paradigm of life in Him than I did to His Word and His whisper.

What I thought was my downfall in those early years was so beautifully constructed by the Father to make my husband a desperate man. And to make a desperate woman out of me. I voraciously avoided seeming desperate – what would others think? how bad could it get? what might we have to lose? – but desperation is what creates hunger and hunger is what carves out space for God.

And after nearly twelve years of marriage I can say with confidence that a man with skinned knees, desperate only for the strength of His Father, is worth more than even a full year of no failures.

To the wives of these men (or the husbands of these wives … or the mothers and fathers of these children, seemingly “failing”): Your strength is your prayer life because your only strength is Him. Talk to God (instead of trying to save them). Often. Pour out your fears about their brokenness and be ready to receive back from Him His words over this one you love. This season may even be less about them than it is about you. (Assume that it is and I promise tomorrow will look different to you.) That “same darn pothole” was the place where I learned to pray. Pray His Word until it becomes like breathing to you — inhaling Truth will slowly begin to replace any lies you’ve been feeding on in this dark season. Ask God, in private, to give them a repentant heart — repentance is our catalyst for healing — and pray those same words for yourself, as you’re likely seeing your own potholes begin to surface in what seems like a mess.

Finally, adore.

In the most unlikely of seasons: adore. Look up and let the truth of who He is in His Word replace anything your eyes might physically see. Adoration is a series of baby steps towards living with His unseen as your reality.

Here is our May Adoration guide as a place to start — we’re still early in the month. Jump in!

For Your Continued Pursuit: Luke 7:36 – 50 | Proverbs 24:16 | Psalm 103:12 | 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 | 2 Corinthians 4:1-7 | Hebrews 12:1-2 | Luke 13:3 | 2 Peter 3:9 | Proverbs 28:13 | Joel 2:13

First through fifth photos compliments of Mandie Joy. She also took the chicken-scratch from my moleskine journal and prettied it up as a monthly adoration guide we all can follow! If you’re on instagram, she posts each adoration verse, daily! Sixth photo compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography.

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I just took the plunge and am on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

Some years it was behind my apron, fixing up a feast at home for my mother-in-law while Nate attended church, and other years it was underneath my covers, seeing this thin sheath between me and the world (which had what I wanted) as my greatest ally.

Our church seemed unusually prolific, busting at the seams with round-bellied women and diapered toddlers. It often felt like work for me to walk into a room and see them for His beauty on them and not simply as women who knew this apparent “rite of passage” — that I couldn’t quite get. At times, this surfaced envy and at others just that thick ache of loss and all the “why, Lord?” questions that came with it. On days when I wasn’t running to Him with what surfaced, it was all easier to avoid than to face.

I didn’t like who I was when I stared into what I didn’t have.

On this particular Mother’s Day, I took my customary pass while Nate joined the mama’s being celebrated.

Just the previous day, I’d had a few extra minutes to pop into a greenhouse boutique that held almost nothing we could afford at the time. I poked and prodded through trinkets and potted plants and gift cards — something I’d rarely done. One, in particular, caught my eye; it was exactly my taste. With no wiggle room to splurge, I went on with my day.

Not twenty four hours later, Nate returned home from church with that very same pot, filled. A gift. My fifty-something friend, a mom of four and grandmother of three, had picked out and packaged just for me. She’d taken her eye off of her big day to ask Him who else needed celebrating.

Though she didn’t know this particular ache, she scooted close to His heart, the One who is the best giver of gifts.

And that day she was His reminder to me: not one of your tears is lost on me, Sara.

On a weekend when women stand and are celebrated for that glorious mundanity which is motherhood, there are just as many sitting beside them, whose hearts are sunk. The one who lost her baby this month and the other who’s logged years — not months — trying to conceive. The mama whose husband died or isn’t around to rally those troops to celebrate her and the other who has fostered children into a forever-mama’s arms but has none, yet, of her own. The single woman who wonders, on this particular day, if femininity has to be tied to offspring, and the mother — adopting — who has no stretch marks, only paperwork, to show for her pursuit.

They share the bench of our pews.

The crazy thing about that church, years ago, and all those women who birthed their first, second and third while I knew them was that they also represented what His hands and His feet can do for the broken. When I moved out of the back row and began to let them see my blood-red vulnerability, He used them. Beautifully.

Just like He used Linda on that Mother’s Day for me.

If we ask Him to highlight the unique pains of those around us, we might just get a chance to buy the extravagant pot. And, even more, we might just get to receive a piece of the Father’s heart for us, in our giving.

We so often look away at another’s bleeding — what do you say? how do you respond? – as evidence of our small view of God. We subtly believe His hands are tied against their pain that is unfamiliar to us, that He’s dumfounded, like us. But His hands aren’t tied.  And He doesn’t turn, He leans in to them. 

These women are at the threshold of disovering a side of Him, known uniquely in their ache. They have gold underneath those tears. Their reproach will one day be their crown. 

And it’s in putting on His unnatural love for them that we get to move from talking about the beauty of the unseen and the eternal “not yet” of His to walking it out.

Whose Linda will you be this weekend? 

Ask Him.

Photos compliments of Mandie Joy. She’s also taken the chicken-scratch from my moleskine journal and turned it into our May Adoration prayer guide. It’s not too late to jump in, adoring Him, this month. [Daily adorations are also on instagram.]

And (a little bit of a gasp here), I just took the plunge and am on twitter (amazing for a girl who can barely shut down her computer on her own!). You can find me here: https://twitter.com/SaraHagerty. Be gracious with this slow adapter .

It’s often near the surface for this one — not the year she was “chosen” and a mommy and daddy flew all the way across the ocean to look her in the eyes and call her daughter — but the too-many, earlier years that still seem to weigh heavier. These days, she lives buoyant and giddy. Her eyes have found a sparkle and we see them more than we see those hands that spent nearly a year awkwardly covering them. My little girl laughs. A lot. And this week when I hugged her I could tell her body wanted to melt (not stiffen) in my arms.

But just within her reach is the shame she feels about her life on the other side, when her given last name tied her to no one. One phrase or question or hint of her past and I watch those eyes, which just harnessed a sparkle, go dark.

Adoption saved her and it haunts her, because of its open-ended definition to her. It’s still a question.

She, like many of the rest of us, has yet to reconcile the power of this one act.

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I hadn’t even kissed their foreheads or tickled their feet and this stranger’s words about them stung.

“Oh, you’re adopting? Just you wait. Once you have them at home I’m sure you’ll be able to have children of your own.”

A phrase I’ve heard a hundred times, and it never ceases to give my heart pause. Children of your own, words that expose a subconscious understanding of adoption as charitable affection versus primal love. As if these, once-adopted ones, were somehow, not truly … mine.

There is a distinction in our language about those children, once adopted, and their biological counterparts that reveals much more about the state of our hearts — the state of my heart — than it does about the children to whom it’s referring.

That simple phrase, often spoken by beautifully-intentioned people**, reveals the shame under which my daughter sometimes lives. But she’s not alone, she just lives an outward existence that represents the battle each one of us fights in our understanding of Him.

It is inherent to human flesh. We are interlopers, or so we think, hanging on to the coattails of another person’s inheritance. Certainly we’re not “one of His own”, we hold deep-down; instead we grasp at something we believe will never really name us. We are simply recipients of His charitable affections, we subconsciously reason.

Our language about physical adoption reveals the gaps in our understanding about how He has adopted us. And those words that sting when I hear them make me hurt more than just for my children, but for the representation of His name.

Most can’t imagine a love beyond what we see in the natural as the most intense form of love — the kind birthed when a mother’s body breaks open to give life to one that shared her flesh and her breath. How could it be that a mother could not only love, but see as her own, a child that her womb did not form and who wears another mama’s skin? We see the struggle of attaching, mother to child and child to mother, that so often happens in adoption, and it only reinforces our subconscious belief that true love between mother and child is only inherited through blood … and not won.

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When her eyes fill with the shame of her history and her heart begins to clamp behind them and adoption is still her question — am I truly “in” or just posing – I see me. I see a hundred weak yes’s as just plain weak and all the things I’ve declared with my mouth that my body never fulfilled and the times I poured out prayers to Him only to forget Him, the real source of my strength, hours later.

I see a never-ending list of failures.

I live, subtly, as if I am on the outside of that fence. Just like her.

All things that could be wiped away in an instant if I understood the power of His having adopted me. This reality changes everything.

I am a child of His own, this God-Man who wrapped His holiness around my sin-stained existence and renamed me.

Adopted.

Grafted.

I am one who is marked by His name more than any of my failures.

A child who knows that adoption isn’t really about the past that haunts her, the forever stamp of separate, not included, but instead the name of the King who fought, hard for her — she wears a love that is fierce.

She’s a force with which to be reckoned, this wildly-loved former-orphan.

Me.

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So when I hear that phrase “a child of your own” separating the children under my roof from the one my womb will bear, and my heart saddens at the misunderstanding of this wild-love that’s been birthed within my home* among children who wear another mama’s skin, I can’t help but think of Him.

He calls me “His own” when the world and my heart wants to label me forever severed.

Adoption is His great declaration.

*For the mama who has children “of her own” wearing different skin: This love we birthed, when we signed countless papers and spent sleepless nights waiting and fell in love with a picture or a name before we heard a heartbeat, is other but still very much His. To love them fiercely, like blood, requires an unnatural impartation of His love, in and through us. It’s not normal, but it is fully possible. In Him.

If you’re wrestling under the weight of the “not yet” that you feel towards them or the “not yet” that they demonstrate towards you, don’t shrink back. This gap is merely His opportunity to move. Now, more than ever, it’s your time to pray and to ask and to hope for Him to bind your family with a beautiful love that can only point back to His name.

**For those looking for a new term: There is grace to learn, and learn now. If you are like me, you have likely been one who learns what not to say by saying it several times the wrong way . You are in good company.

The term we and many other adoptive families prefer to use to distinguish a child born into a family versus one adopted into a family is “biological child”. We, personally, prefer not to refer to our children as “adopted children” as we see adoption as having been a one-time event. We just call them our children. (And this leaves room for all the other adjectives that define them;)). If we need to distinguish, we’ll say “we have four children who were adopted.” But that’s just our personal preference. No need to stumble over your words around us, we’re all learning — there is grace for you to stumble while you learn!

Photos compliments of Mandie Joy (who is currently fostering a baby, stateside! Pop on over to her blog to catch a glimpse of those baby-toes.)

For Your Continued Pursuit (verses on adoption): Ephesians 1:4-6 | Galatians 4:5-7 | 1 John 3:1 (&2) | Romans 9:26 | Romans 8:14-16 | Romans 8:21,23 | Ephesians 2:19 | Romans 9:8 | John 1:13 | Isaiah 43:7 | Psalm 27:10 | Hebrews 12:6 | Revelation 21:7 | Hebrews 2:10 | Ephesians 3:15 | John 11:25 | Psalm 68:5-6 | Psalm 10:14, 17-18

They hadn’t been on my counter for 12 hours before he awoke to my sobs from the other room.

Could it be? Could it really be?

We found each other in the dark and wept a new kind of tears over this heartache that had the dust of nearly a decade.

Today we were crossing over Jordan.

Though it was February, this portion of our lives – still hanging in the balance of winter — was over.

Spring had come.

My womb had opened. I was carrying a child, within.

We lingered for weeks into months cupping our hands around this sacred secret.

It even feels slightly betraying to share it here, now, but my body can no longer hide what’s been warming inside.

How do you say goodbye to a season that He’s used to make you into who you are?

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So, for months I have had a conversation with her, that 23 year-old bride who didn’t know she was on the front-end of some of the hardest years of her life.

I reach across the table from her in my mind and clasp my fingers around the parts of her life that would soon be raw and bleeding and speak the still-nascent clarity that twelve years of walking that long and quiet road had produced.

She didn’t have a grid, then. I so want to impart to her what twelve years of Him over all the unexpected pain would do.

I stare deep into eyes that, then, were more vacant than she realized and say the words of life: hold on to Him. This will all be worth it one day.

I know as I say it that her life, so carefully formed around hedging herself in from all that she feared, couldn’t possibly absorb what “worth it” might mean. After all, fear makes life small.

Her greatest vision for what would constitute being “worth it” for a time might be some sort of outward expression of vindication: her body healed, her finances righted, her marriage thriving, her friendships forged. While those things are so good and true and beautiful, the conversation in my mind with the 23 year-old version of me centers on something so different. Other.

You won’t be the same on the other side of this. The bitter gall from which you once deeply drank will become your crown, if you let it … if you let Him. He will crown you with a reproach that only He can share, and that will simply be what it truly is — stunning — if seen through His eyes.

Hold on, young one. You will know God in your barrenness as the giver of life — before your body ever holds another’s heartbeat inside of it. He has life to give you. Now.

I keep watching her. I see these vignettes of her life that were once so sour to me, but now they are like my cherished photographs.

That girl was made woman in the dark.

I watch her (like it was yesterday) force her foot against the pedal down to the floorboard as she sped away from her parents’ home, secretly hoping she could drive and never turn back, away from all this mess. Behind her was her father, whose brain had succumbed to a diagnosis that was becoming a verdict, and news of yet another delay in their adoption. Even these overshadowed her ever-present barrenness.

She could barely speak on the phone when she received the news about the lost adoption paperwork. She was teetering long before that phone call. How much could bear down on one heart?

Tears burned angry down her cheeks as she isolated each variable in her life that was causing her pain. Any single one could have leveled her, but all of them together seemed to speak an ominous declaration over her young-life: At what point did this life turn cursed?

I want to meet her at the end of that long country road and tell her that her twenty-something life was not cursed, but chosen. And that the tomb was but a holding place for a body that would be forever marked with resurrection.

This child would one day run her hands across scars that told the story of a God-Man whose skin she got close enough to smell, in her darkest hour.

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As we celebrate twelve years, this week, since the day that little boy in big-boy skin asked that naïve-to-life wee thing to marry him, we tell the world outside our home that, as with Jacob’s Rachel, He remembered.

Twelve years later, He remembered.

I almost feel like I need to whisper the glory streaming forth over this announcement because it is so sacred to my story, and that it speaks of a remembrance that didn’t just happen the day my womb opened and I entered into spring.

At year one of winter it felt like a lifetime.

At five, it indicated that we’d crossed into new territory – as through the seventh, that came and went. Yet, the power of His hand as Healer was working, even then. We had hearts to be healed and understandings of Him to be mended and conversations with our Daddy to be initiated before my body, broken, would be pieced back together.

His power to heal is progressive, if we allow it.

I wanted a one-time miracle, a story I could shout from the rooftops that said “our God heals, against all odds!” but instead He gave me six long and quiet stories, first, under my roof.

Each of us would preach the message of His healing with our lives.

I thought my open womb would be the best and only glory story, but instead He let me cradle the fruit of three women’s frames with this same message and introduced healing into me and Nate in ways we never knew we needed.

My life has been living His healing that my burgeoning body has only just now revealed.

Every kind of miracle feels uncomfortable for flesh to accept. I lived hundreds of miracles in the winter, when the ground felt hard to the touch but when life was germinating, thick, within me. My heart was revived in winter. He breathed on the fractured parts of me with a tenderness that has left me love-struck.

All the while I couldn’t let go of asking for another foreign-to-flesh miracle.

To know Him is to hope for the not yet seen. If hope died it would only be a reflection of how my perspective of Him, and what brings Him pleasure, had grown dim. Because hope is a matter of life and death — for the heart.

The way He has merged these miracles has been well more powerful than what my mind could ever have conceived. This family of mine, we share a beautiful branding. All of us wearing some form of His scars.

So I lean in close to the 23 year-old heart (that she doesn’t know will find itself shattered in a hundred-pieces just around the corner) and I whisper: there is a Man on the other side of this that you’ll meet along the way who will pick up every broken sliver of your story and write His name on each one. And your knowing Him, alone, through this, will make every tear worth it.

Hold on to hope. Hold on to Hope. It’s what will be most challenged – even by those closest to you — as the world around you collapses, but it is your greatest weapon because it is His ticket into the Unseen. Hope requires a true view of God. And that true view of God is not natural, He imparts it. One day, the Unseen will be more real to you than what your eyes can physically perceive.

And I sit back and wrap my arms around the girth that now holds this child and I say, Father, You are no more good today than you were a year ago. Though I am overwhelmed by this new way You’ve shown yourself to me as healer.

Winter and spring share this in common: He is healer in both.

For Your Continued Pursuit: Joshua 3 | Romans 8:5-6 | Luke 1:37 | Job 37:5 | Genesis 30:22-23 | Romans 8:24-25 | Job 1:20-21 | Isaiah 61:11 | Isaiah 51:3 | Isaiah 64:4 | Song of Songs 2:10-13 | Romans 5:3-5

Third, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth photos compliments of Mandie Joy.   First, second, fourth and ninth photos compliments of Cherish Andrea Photography.