Freedom from Answers

Whenever I approach life with a certain sense of arrogance and know-it-all-ness, I realize that I miss out on a good many things that I could actually learn from others. This tendency I have towards being the man who has all of the answers and none of the questions is certainly a tendency that I have enjoyed losing much of over the last few years. In exchange, I am gaining knowledge, answers, rich relationships and most of all - life.

Last week as I flew home from a trip to Mexico with some of my friends, I had the opportunity to sit next to a man and his family who were in the states so this man's oldest daughter could undergo her 22nd surgery for Spina Bifida. Though we had never met, this man and I had the most amazing conversation on our way from San Diego to Salt Lake City. The commonalities between us were incredible. Born just 10 months apart, we are the same age. He has been married for 10 years. I have been married for 9. He has 3 children - all girls. I have 4 children - all boys. He is a runner. I was holding my latest issue of Runner's World magazine. His connection with his God is important to him, as mine is to me.

As we sped down the runway and lifted off, I looked at him and said, "I really don't enjoy flying." We both laughed it off and continued in conversation. About 6 minutes into our flight as we came close to our cruising altitude, we hit a small pocket of turbulence. I became fidgety which was quite evident to him. He leaned over and said, "You know, Mr. Brian, in my religion, we believe that our God is in control. We believe that nothing happens to us apart from our God knowing about it and we believe that we can trust that things will be okay because our God is in charge."

I replied, "In my religion, we believe the same thing. I'm just not very good at it."

From that point on, we conversed for the entire hour and a half flight. We talked about everything from raising our kids, to our vocations, to our favorite hobbies. It was the most beautiful 90 minutes of my day.

I learned a great deal last week from this Muslim man from Saudi Arabia. I learned a great deal about love and life, about family and priorities, about sacrifice and selflessness, but most of all, I learned about faith.

It causes me to wonder how many times I have missed out on opportunities to learn from others who were different than me because I thought I was the one with all of the answers?

These days, I feel as though I am on a continuous journey of learning just how much I don't know. And I must say, I am loving the process and finding great freedom in this journey.

Letting God Off the Hook

I recently listened to a podcast of a roundtable discussion between a pastor of a christian church and 4 members of his church who are part of the LGBT community. It was an interesting dialogue as this pastor so lovingly engaged in honest conversation with his four friends who are all seeking to follow Jesus and are lesbian, gay and/or bisexual.

During the course of the conversation, one of the women said that she went to this particular church simply because someone invited her. She described her experience that day in that particular church as 'profound.' Having very little previous exposure to church she said that day she decided to 'allow herself to encounter God', but in order to do so she felt as though she had to 'let [God] off the hook for all the stupid things people say about him.'

I wonder....

As a follower of Christ, am I more of a hindrance to people connecting with God or an aid?

Do my words and life express God as some angry, unattainable deity that is full of wrath and judgment or is he as approachable as Jesus was to the prostitutes, poor, thieves and bums?

Do people in my life need to let God off of the hook because of stupid things I say about him (or ways I portray him)?

Finally, if you are not one who follows God, I'm curious what kinds of 'stupid things that people have said' would you need to let him off of the hook for in order to investigate him further?

8109 Miles

Kristy and I were married on March 1, 2003. Like most couples, we both came into our relationship with lots of thoughts and ideas and dreams about what and who we could be as a couple. From the very beginning, one of the things that we discussed often was our desire to one day adopt a child. We were so young at the time (and we still are), but individually we both shared a similar desire, a heart to one day be parents to a child who did not have parents.

It was not long into our marriage that we became pregnant with our first son. Micah was born in 2004.

Our second son, Jonah, was born in 2005.

Our third son, Nate, was born in 2007.

Our fourth son, Lucas, was born in 2008.

It’s not that we really had anything against 2006; we were just taking a little breather.

Though, we were incredibly busy having all of these little fellas (some of us were busy making, some busy having) we always kept our conversation about adoption going. We would discuss between pregnancies if the timing was right and each time the timing just didn’t feel quite right.

After Lucas was born, we picked the conversation up once again. Only this time, something felt different. We both sensed that we still wanted more children, but we also sensed that we might be done actually having children. For the past year or so, we have revisited the conversation about adopting a child, many, many times.

The desire has continued to grow and in January of 2010, we took the conversation from ‘should we one day adopt?’ to, ‘we should one day adopt.’

In March of 2010, Kristy and I took a trip to Austin, TX together with our 4 boys to spend about 8 days with some friends. While we were there, we experienced incredible bonding as a family and amazing time being fully engaged with one another and God. On that trip, I remember looking at Kristy one day and saying to her…

“We have our lives to live and love together. If there are dreams in our hearts that have been placed there by God, then we need to trust him and chase after those dreams. We can do anything that we want. We are deeply connected to God and we can trust the stuff inside of us.”

We came home, and decided that now is the time.

On April 28, 2010, we applied to adopt a baby girl from Ethiopia.

Today, our application was accepted. (This sentence should be read with a ridiculous amount of enthusiasm and excitement!)

We are choosing to adopt a child, because feel that God has given us a heart for more. It is true, with our track record, that we could probably have more natural, biological children; however, we know that there are millions of children around this amazing globe who do not have wonderful homes to grow up in and we would like to open our lives and share our love to make a lifelong difference in at least one of these children’s lives.

We have chosen international adoption because our hearts have been enlarged by the love of our incredible God - our God, who is a global God and has taught us so much over the years about his kingdom and his intense love for all people. At the same time, Kristy and I both have an unexplainable leaning towards Africa.

For those of you who are interested, we invite you to journey with us. We have created a new blog for this journey at http://www.jeansonneadoption.blogspot.com/.

Along the way, we would greatly appreciate all of your prayers. There are actually a few specific things that you could pray for:

Please pray for our daughter who, more than likely, has not yet been conceived.

Please pray for us and for the process. International adoption is a long and tedious process and there is a lot of red tape. Please pray that things go smoothly.

For various reasons, international adoption is incredibly expensive. We have a game plan in place, but would appreciate your prayers in this area.

Please pray for our daughter’s biological mother and father who will be placed in the position of having to put her up for adoption.

We are incredibly excited about this path and this journey and look forward to sharing it with you.

Thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers!

* 8109 miles is the distance from New Orleans, Louisiana to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.