girl or boy

one reason why i want a little girl:




two reasons why getting two boys will totally "rock":





(and yes, i own both of these shirts).

(and also, i get in a bit of a conundrum about whether little boy clothes should be manly or cute. i think these shirts are trendy and manly, but then i have some other things that are more little boy cute. i think a variety of styles is good, but i really don't want to be that mom that dresses her little kids like teenagers. thoughts??)

all clothes courtesy of babygap. which actually has decent prices if you buy on sale.

7 months

today we have officially been waiting 7 months for a referral.

we are hoping we only have a couple (a few?) more months to go.

i don't have much else to say, but i did want to share this link to powerful words of truth.

baby dolls

i was talking to my dad last night on the phone when he asked:

"why didn't you play with baby dolls?"

"what?" i said, a bit confused because this question seemed to come out of nowhere.

"when you were little -- why didn't you play with baby dolls? you liked to play with barbies, but not baby dolls. where did you get all these motherly instincts?"

then it made sense. we had been in the middle of another conversation about our kids. and as i spoke with tenacity about attachment and brain development and how i refuse to leave my kids between our court date and embassy date, my dad was thinking back to all those times i sat on the couch while my sister got down in the floor and played with the newest baby cousin.

now, let me clear one thing up: never in my growing up years did i express any hatred or apathy towards children. my parents won't like reading this, but when my younger sister expressed a more natural affinity to kids than i did, my family suddenly decided that she liked kids more than me. so when the new baby cousins came along, everyone would say, "so-and-so just loves megan, doesn't he?" or "come on, megan, get down and play with so-and-so." it would kind of be like i wasn't even there.

so i understand why my dad is a little surprised to hear me be so motherly even though my personal opinion is that all women have these instincts even though some express them more comfortably than others (and for some, the object of those instincts isn't always a child).

but i want to share my answer to his question because i think it will help people who aren't really familiar with the unique issues facing children from "hard places" and their families. you see, my maternal instincts, i think, have become heightened throughout this adoption process because i am continually broken by the plight of the orphan. i feel fiercely protective of my children (and really all 147 million orphans in the world) because i've come to understand where they will come from and how that will affect them.

people often ask me how an infant really understands abandonment and trauma. i think the assumption is that an infant is too young to make sense of anything going on in his world. however, the truth is that while infants cannot verbally express their understanding of trauma, they experience it deeply. this is because the infant brain is the primative brain, meaning that what an infant experiences is immediately coded into the lowest part of the brain stem and becomes like the "script" that little human being comes to live by.

what is quite amazing about God's design of attachment between mother and child is that it's built into our bodies and our senses. when a baby is inside its mother's womb, it comes to know its mother's scent and the sound of its mother's heartbeat. when the baby is born, things like breastfeeding (breastmilk carries the mother's scent) and holding the baby close re-inforce the attachment that has already occurred in utero. it's even amazing to note that baby's have limited eyesight for the first few weeks of life and can only see enough to identify the face of the person holding them -- most often their mother.

so imagine what the script would say if a baby was born to a mother too poor or too sick to care for him. imagine what would code into the brain of that child when his mother had to leave him on the side of a road (with a prayer that someone would find him and take him to an orphanage).

abandonment. unmet needs. hunger. thirst. fear.

and then imagine what would continue to be written in the script if that child was taken to an orphanage where there were likely several different caregivers, too many children for each child to have significant one-on-one contact with a caregiver, and not enough resources for each child to have physical needs met.

abandonment. unmet needs. hunger. thirst. fear.

now, a lot of people assume that adoption fixes everything, that adoptive families "save" children from all that terrible stuff, and, in essence, reverse the abandonment, unmet needs, hunger, thirst, and fear. and the reality is, while adoptive families certainly make a new way for their children and want to help them heal, things don't change overnight simply because a child is getting hugs and hamburgers. the point i'm getting at is that these things (abandonment, etc) are so deeply written into the soul of some children that it may take awhile for their brains to catch up with what's actually happening in reality.

a child could be in the most stable and loving of homes and yet still not believe his parents aren't going to abandon him tomorrow. a child could actually do bad things to make sure that no matter how terrible he is, his parents won't decide they don't want him. a child could present as being ADHD when he is really just overcome with anxiety about a new situation and expressing it as nervous energy. a child might offer to give you his food at the dinner table when he perceives you don't have enough to eat because he knows what it's like to starve.

i think this is why God commands us over 200 times in the bible to care for the poor. i don't think God wants us to believe that possessions and money fix everything. rather, i think God knows that when a man is worried about how he will eat or where he will live or if his bills will get paid, it is truly his soul that suffers.

and so when i told my dad where all my maternal instincts were coming from, i told him that it pains me to think that millions of children have endured more in their first few years of life than some people do in an entire lifetime. it's not fair that some children have to worry about if their parents are going to abandon them or if they'll have enough to eat or if they're even going to survive until tomorrow.

and when it comes to my children specifically, they deserve to have their mother with them ASAP even if some people consider it unsafe or inconvenient or "against the rules" for me to stay in ethiopia. i have never understood why it's OK for my kids to be in a place some people consider unsafe, but not for me to be there. when it comes to my children, they deserve to have their mother make a personal choice to take medicine in order to produce and pump breastmilk (yes, this is possible and i'm considering it) so they have a chance at a better immune system even if some people consider it a danger to my body. (i mention these things because people have tried to talk me out of them without considering what the needs of my children might be. i don't mean to say that all adoptive mothers must stay in ethiopia or pump breastmilk).

maternal instincts are fierce. and, for me, they grow fiercer everyday as i confront the greatest orphan crisis in human history and the needs of so many children around the globe. every child deserves the love, protection, and provision of a family. i pray God will allow us to give that to many children who scripts did not begin that way.

the gospel according to peter pan

whether he meant to or not, jm barrie captures some major truths of the human condition and the gospel in peter pan.

here is barrie's very striking description of the children who flew away from their parents to enjoy neverland with peter, believing all the while that their parents had left the window open for them to return home whenever they liked. i couldn't help but see human sin and God's love in this:

"off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked. so great indeed was their faith in a mother's love that they felt they could afford to be callous for a bit longer."

what struck me over and over again in this book is that while the movies portray peter pan as the hero of the story and the most likeable character, he is actually the most unlikeable character, perhaps even more unlikeable than the villianous captain hook. barrie goes to great lengths to emphasize that peter is cocky (his cockiness is actually the reason why hook wants to kill him), forgetful of others, and fearful of responsibility (which is why he never wants to grow up). and while we are led to believe that peter's flaws are rooted in his terrible experience with a mother who didn't leave the window open for him, barrie causes us to doubt peter's experience (and thus his belief about mothers) by stating: "i'm not sure that this (peter's story about his mother) was true, but peter thought it was true..." i see in peter pan the darkness that is in all of us -- how we care mostly about ourselves, how we reject the responsibilities that come with following jesus, how we lie to ourselves about who jesus is so we can excuse ourselves from truly following him. like peter, we are rather unlikeable people.

but there is the mother's love. God's love. when we are awakened to the true reality of who God is and how he loves us, we are like wendy declaring that her mother must surely be mourning the loss of her children who flew away from her to enjoy neverland. wendy decides to go home, and she declares to all the lost boys that her parents will adopt them. the window is open for them too! there is enough love to go around!

so they go home, and the window is open. as the children are reunited with their parents, barrie writes poignantly about the cost of peter's rejection of the mother's love:

"there could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. he had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred."

peter had many adventures. he dictated the course of his own life. he didn't have responsibilities. he didn't have to endure real suffering. but he missed out on the one and only real joy -- the joy of the mother's love.

barrie goes on to write that the other children grew up. they had responsibilities like going to school, getting jobs, having children. at times, they missed neverland and wished they had never left it. but, in the end, they realized that growing up was really best for them. and so it is with following jesus.

if you ask me, peter pan is actually a pretty tragic story. in the end, i pity peter. and while the allegory breaks down in a lot of places (like when mrs. darling lets wendy visit peter in neverland once a year), i found this story to be a reminder of how we reject God and his good purposes for us over and over again for what we perceive to be better adventures. even the most well-meaning christians (me included) believe that God loves us and wants us to follow him with wreckless abandon, yet we spend most of our lives frolicking around neverland, running our own lives, refusing to "grow up" and take responsibility for what it really means to follow jesus.

but the window is always open. thank goodness for that.

book review: radical

when i first heard about radical by david platt, i was beyond excited. i was smitten with the subtitle: taking back your faith from the american dream. finally, i thought, an evangelical has written a book that seriously engages social justice and the gospel. i was ready to have my life turned upside down.

and then i read the book. and got really pissed off.

now, to his credit, platt makes some great points throughout the book. his chapter entitled "how much is enough: american wealth and a world of poverty" is compelling, and i am thankful that an evangelical delved so deeply into the issues of american consumerism versus the $1-a-day lifestyle many in our world have. i appreciate that he challenges us to think about what it would mean to sell everything we have and give to the poor. and i love that he writes, "give. give generously, abundantly, sacrificially. give not because your stuff is bad. give because christ is in you." beautiful words.

where i take issue with platt is in his assertion that the most important question facing our world today is where people will go when they die. i don't think the crux of following jesus is a question of heaven or hell. in fact, i think twittling the gospel down to a choice between heaven or hell is quite possibly the most selfish of all explanations of what the gospel is. which is ironic since the whole point of platt's book is to reveal how the american dream has become deeply entrenched in christianity, causing us to relentlessly pursue the "what's in it for me" of christianity.

but i would argue that the american dream is really to blame for this question of "where are you going when you die" aspect of evangelical christianity that is so pervasive in our culture, and it honestly bothers me a lot that platt is so oblivious to how self-serving heaven-or-hell christianity really is. you see, when someone obsesses over where someone else is going when they die, i think they are really obsessing over that person's eternal comfort. hell is a terrible place, very hot with lots of fire. you wouldn't want to go there. but heaven is nice. you would like it there. and so when someone shares the gospel with an unbeliever and attempts to lead them to christ by asking them, "on a scale of one to ten, how sure are you that you will go to heaven when you die?" they, of course, would like to get into some kind of discussion where the unbeliever expresses a desire to go to heaven to which the evangelizer will share how jesus died on the cross so we can.

what is always tragic to me in these kinds of conversations is that jesus only enters the picture after both parties have agreed that heaven is a desirable place where we would like to go. jesus is only useful after we have decided what we want. even more unfortunate is that many people make decisions to follow christ based on heaven-or-hell christianity without even knowing much about who they are following. no wonder american christianity looks so unradical: once people get the heaven-or-hell question out of the way, they can go back to living however they want. jesus doesn't really matter.

i grew up in a church that preached heaven-or-hell christianity. when i got to college, i had the quinessential crisis of faith. and what got me through that crisis and over to another (and, in my opinion, better) side of faith was reading through the gospels. i read them over and over again. i wanted to know jesus. and what i found was a man and a God worth infinitely more than going to heaven or not going to hell. what i found was someone who was angered by injustice, compassionate to the lost, unafraid of touching lepers, generous to the poor, devastated by sin and its effects on our world...someone perfect in every way that i am not. someone who left everything because he believes we are worth risking everything for. someone who knows my mistakes and carried them while he hung -- cursed -- on a tree. someone who does not hold those mistakes against me but invites me to join him in his mission to redeem the world and gives me the privilege of becoming like him.

you see, jesus is the crux of the gospel. the most important question facing us today is not where people are going when they die. rather, it is whether they know jesus. while people reject christianity for a host of reasons, i believe many of them reject it because they are not compelled by a religion that is so obsessed with eternal destiny that it has no power to effect any real change in life right now. the truth of the gospel is that while we have rejected God, jesus redeems us from our rebellion and re-awakens the image of God in us. he gives us the power to be who God created us to be in the beginning. he gives us purpose when once we were just aimless wanderers. and he gives us a mission when once we were living for ourselves.

when i tell my kids about the gospel, i want them to make a decision to follow christ because they are so compelled by who jesus is, not because they like the idea of going to heaven over hell. if we make christianity a question of heaven or hell, then we commit the great sin that got us all here in the first place: thinking that we (and what we want) are more important than God. only when we truly realize we are the least important players in this great story God is writing will we begin to see what being radical is all about.

ps -- i actually think heaven is an important part of the christian faith. heaven is where redemption is finally complete, so christianity doesn't make sense apart from heaven. but heaven does not make sense apart from jesus, so my point is that heaven is not the purpose for being (or becoming) a christian.

a job to be passionate about

ever since i can remember, i've dreamed of having a job i am passionate about.

when i was younger, i wanted to be an astronomer. or an astronaut. i had no clue if those jobs made much money, but i was intrigued by planets and stars (and still am). unfortunately, around the fifth grade, i realized that i was horrible at math and got motion sick on about any moving apparatus other than a car.

in high school and early in college, i aspired to be a star journalist. i worked at my hometown newspaper off and on for 4 years. during my senior year of high school, i did a huge project on broadcast journalism and shadowed a few news anchors. i suddenly had dreams of becoming the "conservative couric" -- a katie couric for the evangelical, politically-right-leaning crowd. but then i realized that while i was skilled at writing (and talking), i had no desire to always jump up and go when a story broke (and i couldn't pass beginner's economics which was required to get into journalism school at unc. see, i really am bad at math).

through all of this, my dad reminded me that being passionate about your career was a bit overrated. think about retirement and what you'll need when you get old, he would say. he would also gently remind me that he wasn't peeing-in-his-pants excited every morning to get to work, but he went because it provided for our family and ensured the he and my mom wouldn't be inextricably dependent on the government from age 65 and onward.

so i thought on these things and did what any idealist would do: i took the "little miss sunshine" approach to life (i love that movie) and i decided to "do what you love and f*** the rest" (my favorite quote from the move. see, i am an idealist). i hitched the first ride to wake forest divinity school and decided to pay a bunch of money to become a minister. i had no clue how everything would work out, but i knew i had to do it.

fast forward 3.5 years, and i'm currently filing claims at a mortgage insurance company as a temporary job until i actually do i have a job that i'm passionate about -- motherhood. being a stay-at-home mom is not ever what i dreamed would be my full-time, i'm-so-excited-to-go-to-work-today job (and, trust me, i don't really think it will always be an i'm-so-excited-to-go-to-work-today kind of job), but it's a personal decision that we have made because we think it's best for our family.

in the meantime, i am thankful that the pastoral staff at our church has allowed me the opportunity to do the welcome and announcements for our congregation at least once a month. it doesn't seem like a big deal -- welcome guests, tell everybody what's in the bulletin, mention that we like to pray, and explain why we take up an offering. but, as someone who gets a serious rush of adrenaline (some might call it the holy spirit) when talking about the gospel and how christ has redeemed us to be compassionate, generous, and merciful to our very broken world, this opportunity is such a privilege for me (maybe there's a blog post in my future about my thoughts on women and church leadership).

the truth is, none of this may prepare me for retirement or old age or terrible calamity. and while i think prudence and practicality are important (because God doesn't give us a brain for nothing), i think we worship those attributes just as much as we idolize adventure and passion. we live in a hypocritical culture that is married to the "carpe diem" attitude while having an illicit affair with security. my hope is that my idealist self won't get caught up in being passionate about being passionate, but rather in being passionate about what God wants me to do. i have a lot of dreams for our family -- dreams involving africa and changing the world and throwing security to the wind. but God may never open those doors (and sometimes, i secretly hope he won't because even though i'm an idealist, i'm also a scaredy-cat).

for now, i am thankful that God has been abudantly gracious to give me things to be passionate about and to allow me to live out those things in my daily life. what is left for me to do is be obedient in those things and continue to trust, listen, and wait.

currently

here are current stats on the dean family.

jamie: employed by womble, carlyle, sandridge & rice. working long hours until october (and by long, i mean 12 hour days and some on the weekends). enjoying sleep, relaxation, guitar, and online gaming when he is not working.

lauren: employed (by the temp agency) at rmic (a mortgage insurance company) as of last week. working normal hours. loving free parking, free beverages, and my picture ID badge (none of which i had at the last place i worked). hoping this job will last until we travel to ethiopia the first time (or at least until we have a referral). trying to get the hang of couponing so i can buy mass amounts of shampoo and cheerios cheaply. reading a lot. just finished the problem of pain by cs lewis and this is a soul: the mission of rick hodes by marilyn berger (about a doctor in ethiopia). currently reading radical by david platt and peter pan by jm barrie. humored when reading tinker bell call peter pan a "silly ass." that wasn't in the movie.

dean babies: still unknown to us at this point. no word on when we can expect our referral. owners of a crib, a high chair and bunches of clothes courtesy of our church friends, the albertsons. prayed for and hoped for everyday by lots of special people.