Victory is sweet!
At two and a half years old that spunky bright-eyed girl that couldn’t see through her long bangs rocked our world. She was our first foster placement. Two years later she’d become our first adopted child. All smiles she climbed up in the back seat of my husband’s truck. He looks in the rearview mirror and says, “This is going to be harder than I thought”….there have seldom been truer words spoken.
Those first few months were a whirlwind. I slept with her through restless nights as she screamed out at some unseen (to me) adversary.
We waited for hours on end in doctors’ offices to understand the depth of her neglect. To understand a new diet we had never even heard of.
Holding her down as doctors look at her mouth to find she has herpes in her throat.
All the while my heart crying out…”God! She’s two years old!!!! What kind of human can do this to a child?!”
No training, no other person’s stories, no movie could have prepared us for when it was time to walk it out for ourselves. We had entered an alternate reality and yet...it was her reality. And it was quickly becoming ours.
This last weekend our spunky bright-eyed girl graduated High School. She walked out on the field, up on that stage, posed for a picture and strolled back to her seat like every other student in that stadium. But what I saw was a courageous woman kick her trauma in the face...one more time. What I saw was that little girl that rocked our world 16 years ago be victorious.
I know her story doesn’t end here. As a matter of fact, it’ll be a whole new chapter that we will have to navigate together. But I’m not ready to turn to that page just yet.
So don’t mind me....I’ll be sitting in this victory for a bit longer.
“I have told you these things, so that in Me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”