Our World is Transformed - Tariku's Gotcha Day

"The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed."


I honestly don't know how to even write this post.  I have so much emotion today that if you were reading this on a piece of paper the letters would be smeared with my tears.  Words just don't seem adequate.  Any time you bring a child into your family it is a beautiful moment, and that's no less true when you expand your family by adoption.  On April 9, 2010 we weren't thinking about paperwork getting approved, court dates or travel arrangements to Ethiopia.  We weren't waiting anymore.  Our son wasn't waiting anymore.  We were living the moment we'd been dreaming of for two years.  We were laying tear-filled eyes on Tariku for the first time in person.  Bliss!

I remember kneeling down on the classroom floor and him walking into my arms for the first time.  I thought my heart would explode.  This precious little boy who had been mistreated and severely malnourished was throwing his arms around my neck and kissing me on the lips.  And his smile...oh his smile!   He was perfection.  He longed to be loved, and oh my gosh...how we loved him immediately!  All I could think of was that everything was going to be okay.  We were going to wrap our arms and hearts around him and he was going to experience love like he had never known.  We were going to love him so fiercely that his tender, wounded, little heart was going to heal.  Perhaps what I never saw coming was how much he was going to heal me.

I can't tell you how many times people have told us what a good thing we did when we adopted Tariku...how we rescued and saved him.  I know they are well meaning, but it always makes me cringe.  We didn't do some extraordinarily good thing - we just did what God put it on our hearts to do.   And as for the saving and rescuing...we didn't rescue him.  God saw a little boy in a desperate, lonely situation and chose to put us together as a family.  For those who still would say we rescued him, I would say that he rescued us right back.  

I would say that he has brought a fullness of life to us that we never could have envisioned.  He rescued us from ourselves.  He rescued us from self-centeredness, from fear, from lives we likely would have lived with blinders on.  He has shown us what courage and hope look like.  He has helped us to see what our life's purpose is.  He has shown us again what God does with brokenness and pain - how He rebuilds and restores. How nothing is wasted.  He is a living, breathing masterpiece...a testimony to the faithfulness of God. There is no doubt that as much of an impact as we have had on his life, he has by far impacted and blessed us more.  There's just no two ways about it.  I guess that's how things work in God's economy. How humbling and awesome.  God knew we needed this precious little boy, just as much as he needed us.

And today we celebrate him. We celebrate the moment we became a family.  We celebrate the unbelievable little guy that he is.  But most of all, we celebrate the amazing God that we know and love....the God who took us on a journey halfway around the world to glue all of our broken pieces back together and to unlock in us something deeply profound and beautiful.  We are so incredibly grateful.

Hope you enjoy this sweet video about our journey to Tariku...many thanks to our dear friend, Dan Smoker, for the time, love and energy he put into making it for us.