What? You Are Adopting Again?

*** I am taking a break from the book today to share an announcement.  

I have always imagined there was an imaginary line (or cliff) that separated “normal families” (with 4 or fewer kids) from “those other families.”  You know the ones where you hold up the Christmas card and straighten your pointer finger to count how many of them there are now and then you wonder things like, “What is their grocery bill like?” 

I placed my toes up to the edge of the normal group with the addition of Maggie and then looked over and wondered what those other families were trying to make up for, if they were superhuman, or if they were just certifiably crazy.  Then God grabbed my heart again and swiftly kicked me in the butt and over the edge I was peering into.   Yes, the Henderson’s have prayed and felt God’s leading to become one of THOSE families.  We are pursuing a child that Jack and I met in China.   She is close to Maggie’s age and will be a wonderful addition to our family.

Y’all, I have had some crazy questions asked of me and none of them offend me but a lot made me laugh out loud.  So here are the FAQs for “What? You are adopting AGAIN?”

1.  Do I need counseling?  Probably but there is no time for that.

2.  Will Jack still be able to go to college? Yes.  I am still trying to convince him that it is a worthwhile endeavor.  

3.  Do you not like American kids?  No.  They get on my nerves.  

4.  Will Maggie be jealous?  Maybe but she is the type of child who likes someone standing right beside her at all times and Ruthie is getting too old to play Barbies.  

5.  What did Sam say?  Sam said that he heard Asians are good at Ping Pong and so he can’t wait to teach her to play Ping Pong.  (absolutely true)

6.  How will you pay for it?  Well China doesn’t accept Bitcoin so we will probably use American dollars.  We will be holding a t-shirt fundraiser at some time.

7.  How can I help you in your quest for insanity?  Buy a t-shirt.  That will be our only fundraiser to help with the big chunks that are due right before we travel.  

8.  Are you concerned that if you ask people to give you $ they may not give to the church?  No.  We aren’t asking for $, we are offering a chance to buy a t-shirt.  The people who go to our church don’t relate to their giving that way and buying a t-shirt is completely optional and not a requirement for ongoing membership (although that is a good idea).  😉

9.  Will you teach her English?  No.  The rest of the family is going to learn to speak Chinese and make that our new language. 

10.  Are you sure you can take on another kid with special needs?  I assure you, it is not my kid’s special needs that make parenting hard. Parenting is hard because of the challenges of raising good people in today’s society.  

11.  Does she speak English?  Jack taught her the word, “sister” so I guess that’s a start.

12.  When will you travel?  Our agency has warned us it could take a year.  I already completed a 3 month homestudy in 10 days.  I am praying and hoping for early summer so we have the summer to bond before school starts. 

13.  Will she go to school?  Yes she will be one year behind Maggie.  I am in second place for the longest running family at our elementary school and I am hoping this moves me to a first-place tie until I can bring home another. 

14.  She’s older.  What if she can’t bond?  Last time I checked, healthy bonding was not a prerequisite to adoption or having the opportunity to be exposed to the Gospel. 

15.  Will you buy one of those big vans?  Only if Trent wins that argument and that is unlikely.

16.  Is Trent going to let you go back to China? Yes, I am hoping to go back annually because this ministry of serving orphans and advocating for them is where I feel like I am most walking in my calling.

17.  What if you meet another child when you go back?  Then Trent will get his 18 passenger van.

If you made it through that list then hopefully you get my humor.  Right now, please pray for a speedy process.  If you have a question to add to the list, go ahead and ask and I am happy to add it for anyone else who is wondering if they should stage an intervention. 

Truths I Want My Special Needs (Well Any) Kid to Know- Part 7- Discovering Their Strengths

CHAPTER 6- Discovering Their Strengths

(Pics are just for fun from a recent hot air balloon ride that we took as a family)

When we asked classrooms of kids, “What defines you?”, we consistently witnessed a response based on the students’ strengths.  We saw answers like, “I’m a gamer”, “I play instruments,” and “My love for soccer.”   Honestly, these are the kinds of responses that I expected when I posed the question in the first place.   

So why is this relevant to our special needs kids and why is it important that we parent this answer in all of our children?  I think for our kids from hard places, their challenges are so constant in their lives that it is hard for them to see their strengths.  Helping them find their strengths, as a larger component of their identity, is a giant step toward redirecting them to see how God wants to uniquely use them to impact their world.  

Fifteen years ago, I worked as a physical therapist at Baylor University.  As a member of the Student Life team, I participated in a program to help us find our strengths through an assessment called the StrengthsFinder.  I remember when they were introducing it, they used Michael Jordan as the example for why we should focus on mastering our strengths instead improving on our weaknesses.  They pointed out Jordan’s failed attempt at playing baseball and how he was better served when he was focusing on his basketball game.  It was a memorable example because that scenario had played out in front of my eyes just a few years before when we were all scratching our heads at why the greatest basketball player of all time would bother picking up a baseball bat.   The StrengthsFinder helped me appreciate that our time is not best spent trying to become good at that which we were not born to do but instead on perfecting that which we were created to excel at.  

 

Proverbs 22:6 tells us to train up a child in the way they should go and when they get old they will not depart from it.   As much as I would love for this to mean that if we teach our children the Bible they will follow it all their life, I believe this verse is most accurately taught as an instruction to raise your child toward their natural bent.  I think of this verse when I think of the philosophy that undergirds the StrengthsFinder.  

Another benefit of helping our children find and name their strengths is that it frees them to walk in that strength.  I remember when I took the assessment; it told me that I had the strength of Ideation.  I had never been told that before but was immediately able to look back and see where that played out in my past.  I embraced that strength and felt more freedom to generate ideas for programs and find solutions to problems because I recognized ideation as a reflection of how God wanted to use me.  I hope that helping my children identify their strengths will give them the same validation as they boldly walk in them.  

There are two warnings we need to heed when helping our children discover their strengths.  The first is that we have to completely steer clear of what our personal strengths are and what we would hope theirs would be.  We must be open-minded to how God uniquely created them.  I recently binge-watched The Crown on Netflix.  In one of my favorite episodes, Prince Philip insists that Prince Charles attend his alma mater for boarding school.  Prince Philip was an athlete and appreciated the physical training that would be demanded of Charles there.  In the episode it is clear that the queen disagrees and can see that the school is not a match for the personality of her son.  In the end, she lets Philip have his way and sends Charles to a place that he later described as hell.  Philip was choosing what Charles would be strong at based on his own experience instead of the personality of his child and it did not go well for Charles.  When I was little my mom enrolled me in dance.  I think it was the next step (after naming me Virginia) in raising a really girly girl.  I sucked at dance.  Not only could I not stand still but also I had the flexibility of penguin.  It was clearly not my strength and after 10+ years of lessons, thousands of dollars in tuition, and hours of torturing my poor teachers, I still sucked at it. 

The second warning is to not let our children find their strengths in places that are inconsistent with God’s best for them or that could be described as more of an escape than a strength.  According to CNN, the shooter at Santa Fe High School was described by his mother as staying up all night playing video games.   He also had a custom t-shirt on his Facebook page that said, “Born to Kill”.  Now I know that is an extreme but clearly this kid found his strengths and identity in the wrong place.  Just because he was good at it does not mean it was God given.  Another less dramatic example that is tragically humorous and certainly self-deprecating would be a misguided strength of my own youth.  When I was in junior high, I knew everything about the soap opera General Hospital.  I could tell you the history of the characters and even predict future story lines.  To say I was oddly obsessed would be an understatement.  Importantly, and fortunately, obsession does not equal strength.  It usually just equals a means of escape.  We can’t let our kids confuse the two. 

So in summary, I want to help my child focus not on their challenges or their weaknesses but instead on discovering and growing in their God given strength as they explore how they were uniquely designed to impact the world.