Day 60: Jesus is Everything

God, you are my God; I eagerly seek you.I thirst for you;my body faints for you in a land that is dry, desolate, and without water.So I gaze on you in the sanctuary to see your strength and your glory.

My lips will glorify you because your faithful love is better than life.PSALM 63:1–3, EMPHASIS MINE

Who do I have in heaven but you?And I desire nothing on earth but you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,but God is the strength of my heart,my portion forever. PSALM 73:25–26, EMPHASIS MINE

But I consider my life of no value to myself; my purpose is to finish my course and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of God’s grace. ACTS 20:24, EMPHASIS MINE

More than that, I also consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. PHILIPPIANS 3:8A, EMPHASIS MINE

ON APRIL 14, 2014, I woke Missy up from a twin cot in a Haitian orphanage and bundled her into a van I’d rented for our trip to the Port-au-Prince airport. I couldn’t quite believe that our roller coaster of a two-year adoption journey was coming to an end, and I was getting to bring her home. I soon found myself holding my breath and glancing anxiously at the clock in the gate area of the airport every few minutes, half expecting someone to come up and try to pry her from my arms after all the trauma we’d been through. It took restraint not to run when an American Airlines agent opened the boarding door.

Two hours later, Missy was happily preoccupied with a cartoon on my iPad when we landed in Miami, and didn’t notice the tears rolling down my face. I had to wipe more away as we inched our way through the customs line holding hands, because reality was beginning to sink in that after twenty-four months of slogging through seemingly endless paperwork, the maddeningly slow Haitian child welfare system, and worrying about her physical and emotional health from two thousand miles away, the dream God set in my heart when I was seventeen years old was finally coming true.

My heart had claimed her the first time I held her in April 2012, when she was covered in scabies, her little lungs filled with fluid from tuberculosis, her body frail from malnutrition, her hair reddened by the lack of nutrients in what scarce amounts of food she was getting, and her baby teeth brown from lack of care and clean water. After getting to spend that first week with that beautiful baby, I’d memorized the way her eyelids got heavy during her favorite bedtime lullabies, the way she wiggled when she was excited, and the fierce resolve in her eyes when she was determined. It just took two long years to get the official documents proving what my heart had known all along: I was meant to be her second mama.

By the time we got to Nashville, we were both worn out but then buoyed by all the thoughtful well-wishers waiting for us at the airport. Several of my dear friends and their husbands escorted us out to my car—all the while singing Missy’s favorite songs, much to her delight—and after a sweet prayer and group hugs, I buckled my smiling child into the brand-new car seat I’d broken several nails installing the week before. Then, almost as soon as we began the forty-five-minute drive home, the sky opened up and it began pouring rain.

I was so focused on navigating through rush hour traffic in the storm, and the thunder and lightning were so loud, that it took me a minute to realize Missy had started crying. Poor little thing, all the emotions from our Gotcha Day had finally gotten too heavy for her four-year-old shoulders to bear. The driving conditions were so bad that I couldn’t take my eyes off the road, so I tried to sooth her by speaking in Creole, telling her how much I loved her, and that everything would be alright, but her sobs only got more desperate.

Since an exit was still miles away, the only thing I could think to do was reach my right hand back between the gap in the front seats in a last-ditch effort to comfort her until I could manage to get off the interstate. Almost immediately I felt the warm grasp of her tiny hand in mine, and we traveled like that—blindly holding hands through a ferocious storm—until I was able to pull off the road into a gas station and climb in the back seat with her to hold her while she got her bearings.

And we did that—held hands through the gap in the front car seats—almost every day from April 14, 2014, until Missy got big enough to ride up front with me. Now most days on the way to or from school, she reaches for my hand over the middle console.

It’s a wonder God has trusted me with any love at all this side of Glory because I was so afraid of losing it that I spent years subconsciously running from it. Consequently, I’ve never been married, so I don’t know what self-sacrificing romantic love feels like. But we had the joy of attending a friend’s wedding recently and my heart stood up and stretched its slow-to-develop shoulders wide when Missy reached for my hand during their vows. Then—after we’d held up sparklers and watched the new, deliriously happy couple get into a chauffeured Mercedes and drive off for the reception—she squeezed my hand and said sincerely, “Mom, I don’t love you like they love each other, but I’ll still love you until the death-do-us-part part.” And I thought: “Surely, this is in some small part what the psalmist was expressing about Jesus when he sang: ‘And when I awake in heaven, I will be fully satisfied, for I will see you face-to-face’” (Ps. 17:15b tlb, emphasis mine).

My heart exults over my daughter, who is God’s second greatest gift to me. But Jesus is my everything.

There is none like You

No one else can touch my heart like You do

And I can search for all eternity, Lord

And find, there is none like You.56

• IS JESUS YOUR everything? If not, what could you change to give Him the lion’s share of your heart?