I love my job as a chemist. I love teaching kids about a man named Jesus. When I get to combine sciency-fun experiments as object lessons for my class, I get super excited. I’m a bit of a dork.

A few semesters ago, coincidentally enough- this was the same time frame that I committed myself to the adoption process, our focus was on teaching the fruit of the spirit. If your not familiar with this, check out Galations 5:22-23a

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The class project that semester was growing a plant illustrating that it takes all these things to grow fruit producing plant. Likewise, we are called to live with these qualities and pour into others to have fruitful lives. This is an adoption blog, so yes, I pray each day that I grow in each of these, because I am certainly not perfect.

So I guess we loved our “cucumber” plant to death (oops…we overwatered it), but I could not let the kids expectations down. I kept the plant home for a few weeks and suddenly brought in “pickles” as the harvest. I sure hope the kids don’t grow up thinking pickles grow on trees, but instead the message of love joy peace will be tucked safely within their hearts.

The adoption process has not been a smooth easy journey. My heart has been so happy at times and deeply sad. I’ve been on the peak of excitement and sorely disappointed. Its easy to get wrapped up in so many emotions and I feel like its time to go back to my roots.

From the prospective of my heart, I went into adoption with the desire to open up my heart for a child who needed a momma to love them fully and guide them to amazing opportunities. Somewhere throughout the process, a picture perfect ideology of what I wanted this adoption to look like developed. Going back to my roots, I honestly just wanted to pour love, joy and peace into a child. Going back to my roots, my ideology was being open to God’s plan and the child he would place in my life.

Going back to my roots, I daily prayed with expectation for God to move. I expected him to pull every detail together perfectly. Then, that turned into my timetable and I got lost in the why hasn’t this happened yet. On the homepage of this blog, I reference Matthew 17:20. Faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains.

Ultimately, I know that God is working so many details out behind the scenes. If I tried, I would fail. In the past few weeks, I feel like God has given me a children’s object lesson.

This summer, my church is hosting a vacation bible school. I will be working in the preschool craft area and we have a southwest theme. I definitely saw an opportunity to pull in some live cacti and I ran with it. I jumped on amazon, ordered cactus seed and the necessary supplies. Then, I jumped on YouTube and googled how to grow cacti from seed and followed the instructions to a tee. Then, I waited weeks for something to happen. Nothing. Nothing At All.

Essentially, I lost faith in those cactus seed. I had given up hope and decided that those cactus seed would never be ready by late summer, if ever. So, I found a nursery and bought mature (kids safe/friendly) cacti. I came home, transplanted over 100 plants and put my mind to ease.

Well… God has a sense of humor. A week later and look at my original seed. Beautiful red cactus sprouts.

I now have a better understanding for this season of waiting for a child. It’s all about personal growth, and learning to implement those fruits of the spirit – like patience -in my own life…not just a cutesie object lesson for the kids. I had a heads in the cloud mentality about the mustard seed verse, but now, I have a vividly clear illustration of how beautiful it is when God shows up…in his timing.

God will show up in his timing and join me with my forever child someday. It will be a beautiful day! Until then, this little trip back to my roots has sure settled my anxious heart.