“What is the bravest thing that you have ever done?”

Before Jaelyn was born our lawyers advised us not to bring her home until after the forty-eight hours of maternal consent had passed. Too many custody cases that they had seen, too many broken hearted adoptive parents, too much risk – they said – to take her home after the 12 hour wait that the hospital mandated.

In _The Great Divorce_, the narrator talks about all the reasons that humans choose to turn back to the small dark dingy city that they came from instead of growing into and up-in and through live in the dangerously beautiful new world. One of the stories he tells is of a mother who is so wrapped up in the lives of her children that she cannot bear to let go of them so that she may enter the Great New World.

Parental love, like all the greatest parts of being human seems like one of the most dangerous and difficult endeavors. How do we love without strings attached? How can we possibly invest every hope and dream into these people and then love them just as fully when they need to choose dreams that we can’t understand? I see this question being struggled through by college students who are on the receiving end of constricting love.

So we decided to bring her home anyway. Those 36 hours felt like one of the top 5 most courageous moments in my life. After a two month wait for her, after a miscarriage and all the brokenness that that brings, after two years of infertility.

I read this blog that inspired me. The question:

“What is the bravest thing that you have ever done?”

Seems like one of those questions that push us to tell some of our best stories – look for what we admire mostin each other – and become something more courageous than we are…

peace~