What God Can Do

She wasn't looking for a family. 

She didn't want anything from us. She just came because other people said she should -- it would be a good opportunity -- and to spend time with her sisters, the two girls we adopted internationally last year. 

It was scary and different and unlike anything she knew. But she came anyway.

We didn't know what to expect either. We just knew she was our girls' sister and there was something about her. 

God kept laying it on our hearts to invite her for the summer -- three whole months of togetherness. It was scary and though a lot like hosting also so very different. Our older girls have lived so much life before coming to us, and that life is one we don't always understand or know. Plus what do we know about parenting teenagers? We're still being initiated by fire having been parents to a teen for only a year. But we jumped in anyway.

Because when God leads you down a path, He always makes a way.

This summer God showed us what He can do through an imperfect family filled with imperfect people who mess up time and again but keep showing up time and again, trying to respond to all of the hearts in our home with the same loving kindness he extends to us ... Apologizing time and again when we fall short of kindness and love. And through prayer and listening, laughing and crying, sharing and understanding, He showed us, despite all the future unknowns, one thing that wraps my heart in peace: how six could become seven. 

There is much uncertainty. We don't know what the future holds for our family; we don't know the path ahead. But we know this beautiful soul is part of this family one way or another. Whether some of us are here or there, matters but yet it doesn't change what our hearts understand: we are now seven. 

This is the work of God, this is what He does --  He takes our hesitant yeses, He takes our willingness to show up imperfectly and He does more than we could ever ask or imagine. He is the God who multiples.