It's been a week...

It has been a week since I've written.  At some level, I hope there are several people who missed the daily or every other day updates and are voicing a collective sigh of relief (or shout for joy) at my return today.  On another level, I remind myself that, when I started, I determined that I would not be concerned with how many visits I got or what my following was.  Rather, I would be concerned with the process of exploring my thoughts and ideas in a new way, and, ideally, encourage someone en route. 

In the past week, there has not been an absence of blog thinking.  My mind has actually been thinking on many things, but I've had so little time to steal away and write.  This, post, therefore, may end up being a hodgepodge of thoughts thrown together, which I hope leads to somewhere significant.

Much of my time last weekend and early in the week was dealing with taxes.  Sadly, even when I was not actually working on the taxes, taxes clouded my thoughts more than one would ever choose.  And yet, within my financial flurries, TurboTax gave me moment to pause and be reminded of a touching truth.  Here is the screen that did me in....

"Once your adoption is final, Benjamin becomes your child, and you no longer need to call them adopted."

It's not like I needed the insight and "blessing" of TurboTax to recognize this truth about my son, but it was a cool statement to see in the midst of the number crunching going on.  While each of my children are unique and special in there own ways, Benjamin is my son, equal in status to my other two children.  Nothing will change that.

And yet, the TurboTax wisdom was not only a great reminder of my relationship with my son, but it was also a reminder of my relationship to my God.    As a follower of Jesus, I have been adopted by God and am now called a "child of God".  Nothing will change that.

 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. - Ephesians 1:5

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! - 1 John 3:1

A friend of mine connected me to this video, though I'd heard the song many times and really liked it.  If you watch, be sure to watch all the way to the end....I was hoping it would end that way!

Okay, so as I started this post, I fully intended to write more.  My time, however, slipped away unexpectedly.  The thoughts that occupied my mind all week will have to wait for another day...or, perhaps, they were never meant to be shared in the first place.

Before I close my computer and my eyes, I will attach a picture that I took with my phone this afternoon.  It is a picture of a flock of White Pelicans that are setting up residence, or perhaps merely stopping by our lake for a visit.
 

When I was a kid growing up in Minnesota, I don't recall ever seeing a pelican.  In fact, if someone told me then that pelicans lived in Minnesota, I would have probably laughed at them, convinced that they belonged only along the southern coast lines.  And yet, many years later, the beautiful, sometimes clumsy appearing, birds are making a comeback in a state that once served as a common nesting ground for these feathered friends.

Not unlike the White Pelicans, I am in a place of rediscovering my roots - geographically, emotionally, spiritually.  So much behind, so much ahead, and so much right where I am today.  My hopes are that I hold on tight to those things that matter in this journey and simply release those things that do not.  And, my prayer is that I can distinguish between the two.