Adoption Day!

Today is August 20th.

This morning we dressed up real nice, loaded the family into our car and headed an hour away to a small town Texas court house.

Today is the day that we stood before a judge with huge smiles on our faces… hand in hand as one family… to officially make this boy our son.

Joshua Deondre Price

Although he will still go by Deondre, Sara and I wanted to give him a name that had meaning. We felt like Joshua was a good fit for him. Joshua was a man that feared God and that had many obstacles to overcome in his life… many battles to fight. He trusted the Lord through it all… and that’s our prayer for our boy too… that he would walk with the Lord through all of the trials that he may face in this life.

This past year has without a doubt been the most life changing for us. We sometimes sit on the couch at night and try to imagine what life was like those days before we had children in our house. Did we really just eat delicious food almost every night and then watch 24? How was that even possible?

We think back to those early days of him being in our home. Scared. Uncertain. Untamed. He had been through so much, and we had very little clue about what to do with this kid that all but fell from the sky into our living room. Each day brought new challenges that made us realize that we were clueless.

Today we celebrate all that God has done to get us to this place. How He has changed our hearts and placed a love deep inside of us for a boy that we did not know existed for the first 5 years of his life.

It’s really crazy to think about what we may have been doing when he was born. For me, I had just completed my sophomore year at Texas A&M, and was spending the summer working for an inner city ministry in Brenham. During those three months, the Lord really worked in my heart and gave me a love for kids from hard places. I spent many days hanging out in the projects with kiddos getting my eyes opened to the reality of what many people right in our backdoor experience day in and day out. I think my mind would have been blown if I had known that at that very moment, God was bringing a little boy into the world that would one day share my last name and call me “Daddy” instead of “Mr. Ryan”. Crazy how He works to prepare us for things in life.

Adoption isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. There are so many broken pieces that need to be mended together, and many of those pieces simply may never get the right fit. But, days like this are high points. Adoption day is a happy day for our family and we praise God that Deondre is excited about being adopted by us… although it’s still up for debate about whether he is more excited about getting to drink Coke on this day or being in our family for the rest of his life.  :|

We’re grateful for all the craziness that you bring into our family, little boy. We wouldn’t be complete without you.

Worship Thoughts: The Solid Rock

As a worship pastor at my local church [New Life], I get the privilege of piecing together a selection of songs each week that can be collectively sung by a group of people in worship. In a very real sense, the songs we sing together represent what we believe about God. They make up the voice of our people collectively.

As I have grown as a leader of worship, I’ve really seen the importance of what it means to tap into the voice of our particular group of people and make sure that what we are singing is an accurate reflection of what our people believe and what we are going through. This is why I am passionate about writing songs for our church to sing corporately as well as bringing in more mainstream songs.

I believe that it’s really important to make sure that we sing things that give an accurate view of what it really means to follow Christ. Yes… it’s a lot of fun to get excited and sing at the top of our lungs about how awesome it is to be in love with God… how every day is better than the last… how our joy is overwhelming. But, the reality is, if you follow Christ for more than a few years, you’ll find yourself in seasons that make you wonder, if every day is supposed to be better than the last, then why am I experiencing so many increasingly worse days right now?

I find great solace in some of the hymns of our faith that, thankfully, are being brought back into our church’s voice.

One of the hymns that most resonates with me as I lead our church body is The Solid Rock.

I had sung this song countless times in my life. But, it wasn’t until this past year that I began to identify with it.

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

When darkness seems to hide His face, I rest on his unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil.

His oath, His covenant, His blood, support me in the whelming flood. When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.

On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand

As we have found ourselves on this messy journey of fostering and adoption over the past year and a half, I’ve found that I have been relating to the Lord in a completely different way than I did before. As we swim in a sea of uncertainty and deal with behaviors in our child and in our own hearts that we wouldn’t have imagined dealing with at any point in our life, I find it difficult to sing songs that tell only one side of the story.

There is little hope for me to sing “every day with you is sweeter than the day before”… because all that makes me do is doubt that this God exists… or better yet, feel guilty that my life doesn’t match those lyrics.

But, when I can stand [or lay flat on my face] and muster up the words “when all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay”, I’m reminded of the bigger picture.

I can honestly worship a God that calls us to hard things and brings us through what seems like end-of-the-world storms… and be left with nothing else to say but, “All my hope is in You. All my strength is in You.”

It has been a beautiful thing to stand in front of a group of people whose stories I know… Parents dealing with bringing kids from hard places into their family and wondering where the light at the end of the tunnel is… Couples searching frantically for jobs and coming up dry… Women struggling to see the goodness of the Lord in light of their recent miscarriage… Students seeing for the first time that this world is broken. And yet, when we begin singing this song… when those different voices with all sorts of different stories combine, I can feel the energy from our people. A desperate cling to the hope found in our Savior.

It’s a really tremendous thing to be able encounter.

May our churches be filled with sounds and words that resonate with where we are and that point us to a God that is firm through the fiercest droughts and storms.

Peek-a-boo…

We’ve arrived at the age where he has discovered peek-a-boo. It’s pretty much the most awesome!

Galveston Spring 2012

We were able to head down to Galveston a few weeks ago for a wedding and some other photo shoots. We made a long weekend out of it and just really enjoyed our time with the kids. I was a really great time… those these people!

The [uncommon] Movie Moments of Adoption

Let me be clear… the vast majority of moments in our home are far from note worthy, melt-your-heart, “I’m saving the world” moments. We spend most of our time trying to make “time-out” work for us and reminding ourselves that God is in the middle of this whole journey, so we need to be patient.

We recently watched October Baby in theaters… which is a pretty note worthy moment in and of itself! We can’t even remember the last time we were able to make it to the movies since kids came into our lives. Granted, we went to an 11:20am showing and brought a 5 month old baby with us… yup, we’re definitely those people!

We loved the show. Cried several times through it.

On our drive back to the house, I looked at Sara and jokingly said, “Deondre better look us in the eye one day and say, ‘thanks for wanting me’ or I don’t know what I’m gonna do!!”  We laughed and reminded ourselves that it’s highly likely that those words may never come out of his mouth… I just need to swallow that pill now.

The reality is, those lumps that come up in your throat when you watch emotionally charged movies about crazy adoption stories where children are rescued and lives are changed… those teary eyed moments where you feel like real Shalom peace has arrived in a situation and all is back in place… those moments just aren’t frequenters to our home.

But…

Just the other day we had one.

Just the other night at dinner we had a movie moment with our 6 year old. Wish the film crew would have been sitting at our table, dang it!

As we were eating our dinner together, I just started talking with Deondre about adoption out of the blue. We have been dropping those conversations sporadically with him over the last few months to prep him for what is coming very soon.

I told him that in just a month or two, we are going to officially adopt him and his name will look like ours. I explained that we would go before a judge… and he would be a happy judge because this is an exciting thing. We may even have a party afterwards.

It wasn’t a big shocker that he was relatively silent through this whole explanation. Just staring at his plate like he always does when we talk about things he has no clue about.

After some silence and a few bites of dinner, I asked him how all of that made him feel.

He didn’t say anything.

So, we pressed him again… “Deondre, how do you feel about all of that? What does your heart feel about being adopted and living with us forever?”

He remained silent, but without any fanfare, he took his little brown finger and began drawing on the table next to his placemat (like Jesus telling a parable).

Puzzled for a moment, it finally clicked for Sara and I. He was drawing a smiley face.

Each day at school, Deondre either gets a smiley face, straight face, or sad face. His life basically revolves around smiley faces. For him, this was his stamp of approval on the whole thing.

At that moment, we felt it. It was one of those Shalom peace moments. Teary eyed, lumpy throat, “where is the film-crew?” moments.

Now, that moment was quickly followed by, “Finish your food or you won’t get dessert!”… but, we’ll take all of the small glimpses of grace we can get around here.

We’re so excited to be nearing the end of this fostering journey with our son and making it all official. I can’t wait to write that post into our family’s legacy!

Mason: Wake Up Time

Some of our favorite moments with Mason are when he is waking up in the morning. Sometimes he will just lay there for 10 or 15 minutes with his eyes open and not make a sound (unlike when he wakes up in the middle of the night!).

Those are the kinds of moments that we have decided we really want to try and document in the life of our family.

A few weeks ago, Sara ran into my office in the morning and said, “Quick, grab your camera… he looks really cute getting up this morning.”

So, we tiptoed into his room to attempt to capture him in his undisturbed natural habitat. We got a good 5 minutes of sweet faces before he realized that we were standing there and not picking him up.

We sure do love this little guy!

Mason | c. 4 months old

One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about being a parent who also happens to be a photographer is that I don’t have to plan out photo shoots of our children.

Honestly, I’m getting a little worn out from doing the elaborate photo sessions of kids with all kinds of props and bells and whistles and circuses… it just seems a bit much sometimes and I wonder if one day we’ll look back and just laugh at it all.

When I look back on my children’s photos, I want to be reminded of real moments with them. What they wore all the time… what they looked like sitting in OUR house. I want remember the emotion of what it felt like to hold them.

So, I’ve made a point to just document the mundane things… just our kid wearing what he wears all the time… laying on our floor… looking normal.

This was one of those impromptu photo shoots that happened while I was supposed to be holding Mason while Sara was preparing dinner one night. I was sitting with him in my office and something came over me forcing me to stop what I was doing and pick up my camera. So, I literally just laid him at my feet and used the blank wood floor of my office as a canvas.

Fifteen minutes later, he started fussing, so we shut the thing down and ate dinner.