Online Strangers

Odd title for a blog post, I know...  But since I entered the great world of Blogland, I've probably been asked more times than I can count about why I blog... How could I let "online strangers" read about the personal parts of life?  What is the attraction to it?  How do I have the time? Why is my blog not set to private? Do I care if so-and-so forwarded my blog on to their entire email list? etc, etc...  Up until a few months ago, I don't know that I had a really good answer for those questions outside of the fact that it was just therapeutic for me.  But, now, I do have an answer worthy of sharing...

I just finished up a phone conversation a few minutes ago with a woman that I have never met in person, yet we had an immediate connection and I now feel such a deep bond with her that is difficult to explain.  Neither one of us are able to have biological children, and until you have been through that, there is just no way to really understand.  She was forwarded my blog by a friend of a friend of a friend, and contacted me over the weekend.  Hers was the third call that I have received exactly like that over the last two days.  In a given week, Ben and I usually receive 5 to 7 calls from people like this that we have never even met - all who have questions about our story, what we went through, and the adoption process.  Not to mention the amazing friends and support system that we are surrounded with, many of whom deal with the same problems of infertility.  

If you would have asked me a year ago, when I started blogging, if I thought that it was even a possibility that God could turn a situation that was devastating (in mine and Ben's eyes) into the beautiful adoption story that we have today... my answer would have been most definitely no.   That's flat-out embarrassing for me to admit, especially after seeing how everything we went through fits so perfectly into the plan that God has for our lives.  A plan that is a thousand times better and more fulfilling than anything we could have done ourselves.  

So, the reason that I blog, is that we feel incredibly blessed to be given the opportunities to talk to these amazing couples, to pray with them, and to give them hope about adoption on the other side of their storm.  In no way, shape, or form can we take credit for ANY part of our story because it is not our own - it is God's story and His unfailing, compassionate love at work in our lives.  And that love of God, which we in no way deserve, is most definitely a gift we are willing to open up and share with "online strangers" - many of whom we can now call friends.

A quote that I absolutely love, which I am adding to the side panel of my blog, sums it all up perfectly to me (courtesy of my friend Amanda's blog):

...I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are that you will recognize in many ways that it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track of, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes Himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.

--Frederick Buechner

So, thanks for reading and for taking an interest in our story - you are a blessing in our lives.