Day 75: the Language of the Divine

This is the confidence we have before him: If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 1 John 5:14

The single most difficult thing Missy and I dealt with during the first few months we got to live under the same roof as mother and daughter wasn’t the frequent trips to the hospital or learning how and remembering to dispense her twice-daily dose of three different medications. It wasn’t even my futile, scalp-torturing attempts to learn how to micro-braid her gorgeous Haitian hair. The most difficult, sometimes gut-wrenching, aspect of our first nose-to-nose season was learning to communicate.

Since we’d managed to sort of understand each other with a few common words of Creole and English coupled with facial expressions and charades throughout my many visits to Haiti during the adoption process, I wasn’t fully prepared for the frustration and heartache that would result from our communication gap once I finally got to bring her home to Tennessee.

The first night she fell asleep pretty quickly, obviously exhausted after the long trip from Port-au-Prince to Tennessee. But the next night—after I’d gotten her changed into her pajamas, bundled into her toddler bed, and began singing a lullaby to help her go to sleep—Missy got very upset. I picked her up and did everything our adoption transition counselor and social worker had advised me to do when she showed signs of anxiety in order to demonstrate to her that she was safe and secure. But my actions only seemed to make things worse.

Finally, after more than an hour of her growing increasingly agitated and me vainly trying to soothe her, I went and got the Creole dictionary from the bookshelf and attempted to ask her if she was in pain. The second I began trying to articulate that foreign phrase her head snapped toward me, her brown eyes focused on mine with laser-like intensity and she began talking as fast as she could. A torrent of unfamiliar words poured from her mouth like water from a breach in a dam. After a minute or two, when she could tell by my expression that I didn’t understand, she put both of her baby brown hands on the side of my face and began to speak very intently, with even more passion and volume.

Eventually I replied in English, “I’m so sorry baby, I don’t understand what you’re saying.” At which point she dropped her hands to her side, looked away from me with hopeless resignation, and began to sob uncontrollably. All I could do was repeat one of the few Creole phrases I’d memorized, “Mwen regret sa. Mwen regret sa. Mwen regret sa.” I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

My little girl cried herself to sleep on her second night at home and when her breathing finally settled into the rhythm of slumber I walked out into the living room, sank into the couch, and cried until I didn’t have any tears left either. It felt like my precious daughter—whom I’d longed for since I was a young woman and fought for through an arduous two-year adoption journey—had tried to give me her heart and it slipped through my hands.

Recently an acquaintance told me she’d like to have an intimate relationship with God, but she’d found reading the Bible boring and she wasn’t really “into” prayer. I couldn’t help thinking, You’re letting Living Hope slip right through your hands. Reading the Bible and prayer are not religious chores to dutifully complete or conspicuously avoid; they are the language of the divine through which the God of the Universe graciously allows us to commune with Him. Even more so than allowing us to communicate with Him, our heavenly Father deeply wants us to, a million more times than I wanted to communicate with Missy that night.

It may be awkward at first, and it may take time, but I can pretty much guarantee that like Missy and me, communication will soon start flowing back and forth between you and God when you open your heart up to it!

• Do you read the Bible and pray more out of duty or desire?
• Have you ever considered just how much God wants to commune with you? How does it change things to know that He not only lets you communicate with Him, but He wants you to?
• When have you felt like your attempts to talk to God just weren’t getting through? How did God eventually meet you in that season?