Devotional Reading Plan

Day 4: No More Barriers

Since I filled you in on mine and Missy’s adventure in potty training (and all the toilet paper that came with it), I may as well fill you in on April 14, 2014—another adventurous day in our history, and one I consider the second most important day in my life (second only to the day I met Jesus). Why? Because it’s the day I brought Missy home from Haiti.

Because of Haiti’s proximity to the US – it’s only about a 90-minute flight from Miami – I had the privilege of visiting Missy multiple times during our two-year adoption process. And since we had the gift of establishing some semblance of relationship over the 24 months prior to April 14, 2014, I wasn’t expecting such a huge shift to take place in my heart on our Gotcha Day (the day she actually came home in Tennessee). I mean, I knew that finally getting to bring her home was going to be significant…I just didn’t know it was going to be seismic.

I can remember almost every detail of that day. The way she grabbed my hand and her eyes got really wide when the plane began to taxi toward takeoff in Port Au Prince. The relief that washed over me when we stepped off the plane in Miami, on U.S. soil for the first time. The way she giggled and wiggled in the long line at Customs. The peace that kept me grounded while it was taking so long for our paperwork to get processed in the Homeland Security and Immigration office that it looked like we were going to miss our connecting flight home to Nashville. The way she fell asleep on my lap once we finally made it on board and got settled into the back of that tiny plane. I can vividly remember the way we could hear our welcome home crowd cheering after we got off the plane in Nashville and began to walk toward baggage claim.

But what I remember most—the memory that’s the absolute highlight in an entire day of highlights—is the way I felt that first night at home, sitting on the bed next to her after she’d fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. I remember being so overwhelmed with love for this little 34-pound peanut that I had the literal, physical sensation of my chest expanding. The feelings of love and joy and gratitude and fulfillment were so big and so visceral, I felt like my ribs had to move over and make room.

I realized later that our first night at home was the first time there was no barrier between us. No reality that I had to leave her in the orphanage and fly back to America. No potential of yet another adoption delay. Nobody translating English to her or Creole to me. No lost Internet connection. Not even a dear friend holding a welcome sign or fervently praying. It was just the two of us. That’s when the profound gift of parenthood matured from conceptual to concrete. From my longing for a child to a little girl under my Pottery Barn duvet whose eyelids fluttered while she dreamed and beautiful brown skin smelled like cinnamon and coffee. Watching my daughter sleep that first night is among the purest, truest things I’ve ever experienced.

And Jesus’ incarnation—when He left his celestial home and came to the world He created as God in the flesh—is infinitely better than that first night I experienced with Missy in our home. It’s the moment the barrier between Heaven and earth—between God and His people—dissipated. There in the wide-eyed wonder of a teenaged mom named Mary—who had much more unconventional experience when it came to becoming a mom than I did!—we see the miracle of God with us begin to unfold.

➤Why do you sometimes forget that there’s no barrier between you and God anymore? How might life be different for you if you approached God with the confidence that there are no more boundaries between the two of you, and that he delights over you, even as you sleep?