He Knows Our Needs

There are moments in my life when I have pressed on in faith and walked through the deepest valleys one can know.

Then there are moments when the very hand of God has reached down to me and intervened in this natural world, when He has miraculously changed the course of my life at times in which I have wondered if all hope was gone, and when I have known, in the furthest corners of my mind, that I have been touched by the very hand of God.

It’s been my desire since the inception of this blog to share these miracles God has performed in my life, one by one, on Mondays with all of you, certainly to give Him the glory and praise of which He is so deserving, but also to share that God indeed cares about the very details of our lives, that He is not some far off God who leaves us to flounder our way through this world.

He is not a fairy tale. He is not some made up story that sociologists would have us believe has been passed down through the generations as a coping mechanism that helps us deal with the difficulties of this world and the ever present awareness that our death is one day closer with each passing day.

He is real.

He hears and attends to the deepest prayers and yearnings of our hearts.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I was not talking to God, perhaps as a little child would chat with an imaginary friend. I can’t remember when I didn’t know Him, when I didn’t love Him. I was a very sick child; while most kids were learning how to interact with peers, I was learning how to survive. I’ve often wondered if that’s why God made Himself so real to me at such an early age. For the blessing of knowing Him in my childhood, I will be forever thankful.

So much of me would like to take you back to the pain and the miracles of those long ago days of my childhood, but today I feel compelled to tell you about a more recent miracle that I am aware of and still experiencing the blessing of every single day.

Since this really began as an adoption blog, and as my heart will always remain with the parentless who are alone in this world, it seems fitting that I share this story of laying down my children in the arms of my faithful Heavenly Father, as I travelled across the world to adopt our two daughters who were about to reach an age when they would never be allowed to be adopted.

I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this part of our adoption story with you before, but trusting that God would meet the needs of our biological children as we gave all we had saved to adopt the girls, was probably one of the biggest hurdles for me. I felt irresponsible, and I feared for the children we already had. I certainly had not been able to meet all of their needs in my own strength. I knew, as so many parents of large families do, that no parent can meet all the needs of their children, but I surely wanted to try.

When we travelled to China, we’d been praying for a very long time for the needs of our oldest son who has Aspergers and is legally blind. For years we’d been doing a program with him to develop the lower structures of his brain, to develop his eyesight and to develop the ability for him to see with depth perception, and ultimately to develop the executive functioning of the frontal lobe of his brain. We knew he would have benefited from a hyperbaric chamber. The benefits of hyperbaric oxygen therapy to the tissues and especially the growth of new neurons in the brain are becoming more and more well known.

I’ve shared before about how we knew Eliza and Evangeline were our daughters and that we had to go and get them, but I also want to share that our children had needs too. We didn’t travel to China knowing we’d met all their needs or even that we could. We grew to understand that God’s children are waiting in orphanages and on the streets of every city across the globe for parents to be willing to be His hands and feet and go and get His children.

God isn’t the reason the children are waiting.

We are.

Far too often we hold back, content to stay in our safe worlds and care only for our own. Yet God calls us to spread out our tents, to make room for more, to prepare to care for those whose needs are so much bigger than our own. And all the while, He never forgets our needs or the needs of our children.

…to be continued…

I welcome you to Monday Musings, and I look forward to sharing God’s miracles with you. Next time I will put up the Linky tool so you can link up your blogs and miracle stories too.