Nothing is Wasted

As I laid in my bed tonight my mind raced with all kinds of thoughts from the day, thoughts for tomorrow and thoughts from the past......

Sometimes at night old junk finds its way in. Old pain. Old regrets.

Disappointments, the woulda, shoulda, coulda's.......Failure.

The "why didn't I's" and the "why didn't they's".

It's so crazy how long we carry these things around.

Such a heavy load.

My husband said this week "We are allergic to failure."

Is there a human on earth that has never failed, faltered, or screwed it all up?

We've all felt the pain of failure and yet we hate it soo much.

We beat ourselves up and we beat up others over these mistakes. These broken pieces can cause such distraction in our lives.

So tonight, a story.

A few years ago we fostered a couple precious babies. Even though it was only a few years ago it feels 100% accurate to say that we were young and dumb.....

We had a 6 year old, two 4 year olds and a 1 year old and we took in twin 2 year olds...... if you do the math that's 6 kids under 6 and 3 of them were in the baby-toddler world.

Yea.....interesting decision....I know.

We prayed about this decision. We talked to others about this decision. We felt sure we were doing the right thing.

Well to make a long story short, these little twins were traumatized, they had been newly abandoned and were going through what we can only imagine as hell.

We were not prepared for this trauma.

These little babies were in the worst kind of heart pain a person, little or not, can go through. That pain and despair came out for us to handle, but try as we did, we just couldn't handle it.

We should have handled it.

We should have known.

We should have been ready....

but we weren't.

We were an absolute mess.

We were sleep deprived, clueless and helpless to give these babies what they needed.

 And we had 4 other LITTLE kids that needed us.

"What were we thinking" must have crossed my mind a thousand times a day.

To make matters worse, in the middle of this chaotic situation I got pregnant.... go figure!

Anyone that knows me, knows that I have absolutely horrible pregnancies. Horrible, horrible, horrible!

So you can just imagine how that went over......

It felt like the world was coming to an end. It was the worst, hardest, most painful time in our lives.

And Matt would agree and that's saying something......

We were in over our heads.

We had signed up to be heroes, but instead were getting the beating of a lifetime.

We called our friends and said we can't do this anymore, you have to move the kids to another family.

It completely killed us to say those words.

The twin angels were with us for 6 months. We loved them as our own and our hearts broke when they left.

Really, I don't think our hearts ever got put back together.

We were shattered.

Shattered by our failure. Shattered by the pain. Shattered by disappointment.

We had prayed. We had sought counsel and yet here we were picking up the pieces of a mess I can't describe.

It was the mess of broken hearts.

There is a verse in 1 Corinthians 15:58  that says

Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord [always doing your best and doing more than is needed], being continually aware that your labor [even to the point of exhaustion] in the Lord is not futile nor wasted [it is never without purpose].

Nothing is wasted when you do it for Jesus and really because we serve a God that redeems everything and makes everything new, nothing is wasted, period! 

I still lay in bed at night thinking about the pain and choices of the journey we walked. 

If feels messed up to me, even after those beautiful babies were adopted together into a beautiful christian home. They are thriving, they are loved and they are chosen ........

and even then, my heart hurts. 

God is present in failure. He is present in shame. He is present in weakness. He is present in mistakes. He is present in brokenness. 

I don't get to tie this up with a bow and he's present in that. 

Because nothing is wasted. It all comes out beautiful and redeemed and made new.......

it's not the end.

Nothing is wasted.