A Costa Rica Story.

[NOTE: People have been asking me to tell a story about our trip to Costa Rica. Instead of doing that, I'm going to take a shortcut and reprint here a piece I wrote for a devotional put together by my church. Enjoy.]

I love kids. Perhaps this is why I have so many of them. I love seeing the world through their eyes, or hearing them invent new ways of using language, like when my four-year-old daughter Dorothy decided that “beautiful” just wouldn’t cut it while describing a rainbow, and coined the more accurate “cute-iful.”

So yeah, I love kids a lot, especially my own. So, when we decided to go on a family missions trip to Costa Rica with Believers World Outreach this past summer, I felt great anticipation at the thought of spending time in a foreign country with my kids. This anticipation was tempered, however, by a feeling sheer panic at the thought of spending time in a foreign country with my kids.

Maybe not the “spending time” part so much as the getting there, getting around, getting all our basic needs met, and getting home parts.

Nevertheless, time marched on, and, after many generous donations from many friends, family members, and straight-up strangers, we raised the full amount we needed to get there. Before we knew it, we were in Costa Rica, all of us astounded by the natural beauty of the country.

We discovered that our children are natural travelers, and they’re very good at going with the flow. They generally ate whatever was put before them, went wherever we told them, showed up whenever they needed to be somewhere.

But the real revelation came toward the end of the trip, when we went to minister to a group of people living in an area of Jaco that everyone calls “The Riverbed.” It is a place of extreme poverty, a shanty-town erected on either side of a small river fed by the Pacific Ocean. Families live here, in ramshackle homes constructed of found materials like random doors or wooden pallets or rusted pieces of corrugated tin.

The river itself serves many purposes for this community. It is their source of water for drinking and cooking, it is their bathtub, it is their laundry room, it is their toilet. Oftentimes, it is their trash can.

We’d heard quite a bit about the Riverbed before we went, and we did our best to prepare the kids. We told them, in terms they could understand, about the poverty there, and what the kids there would look like, and generally tried to prepare them for the heart-rending images they were likely to see.

And then the strangest thing happened. We went there, and while Michelle and I were devastated by the living conditions of those in the Riverbed, our kids didn’t seem to notice. And while we were busy pitying the shabbily dressed, smudge-faced, hungry-looking children in the Riverbed, of which there are many, our kids simply approached them, smiled, waved, and began to play with them.

Simple as that.

While we adults—supposed examples to our children—were busy focusing on the differences between us and those who lived in the Riverbed, the kids looked right past that (I’m not sure if they even saw the differences in the first place) and focused on the truth of the situation:

I’m a kid. You’re a kid. Let’s play.

In faith today, especially in America, and extra-especially in this part of America, we tend to focus on the differences. We like to compare different churches, different preaching styles, different worship leaders, different song selections, different locations… we notice what makes each church different. And if we don’t like something, we can always go somewhere else.

But what if Jesus, when he told us we needed to “receive the kingdom of God like a little child” (Mark 10:15), meant that we needed to act like my kids acted in the Riverbed. What if he’s saying that, since “both Gentiles and Jews who believe the Good News share equally in the riches inherited by God’s children, (Ephesians 3:6)” then we need to stop looking at the differences between us and start looking at faith—and church—like this:

I believe in Jesus. You believe in Jesus.

Let’s play.

No Child Left Behind.

Well, we all made it, as this official photo, taken on our next-to-last day there, proves:
We are back from Costa Rica, and, after a quick scan of all our available beds, I find that everyone made it back and is now asleep.

As for the trip, I have to say, it was a delightful time. Here are a few things I learned while abroad:

1) My kids are great travelers. They are very good at standing in long lines at airports that move very slowly*, and on the way there, they did a relatively whine-free job of toting all their clothes, crammed into their individual backpacks, due to our highly rational fear that the airline would lose our luggage (it happened to someone else on our team!).
2) San Jose, capital city of Costa Rica, is much bigger than I thought. And much more cosmopolitan. Being a dumb American, I was expecting ramshackle huts constructed of mud and straw. They have supermarkets!
3) Buying avocadoes the size of your head from some guy on the street? Genius.
4) I never got tired of gallo pinto for breakfast.
5) It's possible to have too much fresh pineapple. Just barely, but it's possible.
6) The people of Costa Rica are absolutely beautiful, inside and out. They are also, by and large, incredibly earnest, and my American sarcasm was lost on them. Fortunately, I know how to be funny without it.
7) The correct way to say "you're welcome" there is not "de nada," but rather "gusto."
8) Even when brewed in mass quantities with subpar water and so-so filters, Costa Rican coffee is incredible.
9) Short-term missions trips are as much about changing yourself as they are about changing the country you visit.
10) The USA is incredibly foolish for sweetening Coca-Cola with high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar.
11) I understand more Spanish than I thought I did. Speaking it is still a problem, though.
12) Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone has something to contribute to the cause of Christ. Even kids.
13) Charlotte's personality is her ministry.
14) Dorothy can be best friends with just about anyone, at any age.
15) Noah was born to play in the ocean. It's like every breaker is his long-lost twin.
16) Emma has the most willing missionary heart of anyone I know. The girl yearns for the lost (even though she gets humanly cranky at times).
17) Marley is great with kids who don't speak the same language as her.
18) Outside of Jesus, Michelle is the greatest thing ever to happen to me.
19) I can take a two-week break from my computer and not only not die, I can not even miss it.
20) "Por favor, depositar el papel en el basurero" is a wicked, wicked phrase, even if they do say please.
21) Americans, myself included, are far too concerned with trifles, to a troubling extent.
22) Guanabana is quite possibly the best tropical fruit you've never had.
23) Franz and Francisco are incredible bus drivers, and, should bus driving ever become an Olympic sport, will take home the gold and silver for Costa Rica. Regardless of where said Olympics are held, these two men will drive their medals back to Costa Rica on their buses. In reverse.
24) You can have some of your loudest congregational worship with just an acoustic guitar and someone playing a pulpit like a djembe.
25) Surfing is simultaneously fun, peaceful, and awe-inspiring.
26) People in Costa Rica actually say "Pura Vida" and mean it. It isn't just a tourist thing.
27) The iPod Touch costs about $550. But there is an authorized Apple Store in the mall in San Jose.
28) If you speak Spanish and aren't afraid of the walk-out, you can negotiate a super-cheap price on just about anything.
29) All kids love VBS.
30) Fly on Wednesday afternoon. There was literally no waiting at the Miami International Airport security checkpoint.
31) When in Jaco, eat at either Soda Rustico or Pachi's Pan. The former is authentic Costa Rican food for cheap, and the latter is a bakery that blows the mind. At Pachi's, order the chicken empanada (only a buck) and marvel.
32) The world needs Jesus, and the United States is not his favorite place in the whole entire earth.

That's all I can think of now. I'm sure there'll be more to come.

Thanks to all who supported us. It was truly an educational, enriching experience for every member of the Palmer Tribe, and now that we all have our passports, I tremble at the thought of where God might send us next...


*(I mean that the lines move slowly, not the airports.)

We're Going!

Thanks to an incredibly generous public, many of our friends and family, and possibly divine intervention, we have raised enough money to pay for our Costa Rica missions trip.

We leave in three days.

I didn't realize how massive this undertaking would be until Michelle started packing for it. There are clothes upon clothes all over the place--who knew it would take so much planning and effort to shuttle two weeks' worth of clothes for seven people?

Anyway, we're all very excited (and slightly nervous) about the whole endeavor. We look forward to seeing the ways God stretches us on this trip (though I'm secretly hoping that he only stretches me in ways that are comfortable--which probably means he won't).

If I can, I'll offer some updates while abroad. I'm taking a two-week vacation from the ol' laptop, but I think there'll be a computer somewhere along the way.

A Must-Read.

My wife doesn't update her blog often, but when she does, it's always worth reading. I encourage everyone to check out this post. Heartbreaking as it might be, it is a transcription of the letter she had to write to the attorney in Africa explaining why we had to forsake our adoption process.

The letter itself is written in a very African style, in Michelle's attempt to speak to the adoption attorneys in their own Ugandan variation of the English language. But the introduction she wrote is very much her own:

I never thought it would end this way. I woke up at 4 am with the grace to write the following letter out.

I am dedicating this post to birth mothers, who loved their children so much they chose to place them with families that could care for them better than they could. Who love so deeply they are willing to hurt the rest of their lives so that their children don't. I honor you women.

Goodbye, my sweet boy. I love you this much.

I admire her bravery in acknowledging and tending the emotional wounds she's sustained in the past few months. I admire her grace and poise in the grieving process. And I admire her willingness to share our story with the rest of the world.

To paraphrase an earlier post: Life goes on. God is good.

Blessings, Brave One.

"Life Is Like A Toilet."

So said my six-year-old son yesterday. He has dreams of becoming a writer when he grows up, and he's pretty good at ferreting out spiritual truths from everyday things.

For example, on Easter Sunday, he informed us that Easter eggs are a reminder of Easter because you open up the egg and take out the candy, which makes it empty inside, just like the tomb was when Jesus rose from the dead.

However, he uncorked a couple of beauts last night. As we drove home from an outing, he said that "Life is like a toilet. When you get all dirty and yucky, you flush the toilet and it all comes back clean. So if you are feeling meanness, you have to flush the toilet and get rid of the meanness and then it will come back as kindness."

I think he meant something about prayer in the middle of that there.

Number two (pardon the pun): My eight-year-old daughter had a compass last night, and she asked me how it worked. So I showed the kids, and then Noah pulls out: "God is like a compass. He shows you the right way you should go."

"Yeah," I said, "you're right. If you ever feel anger or meanness, you can ask God how you should act and he'll show you which way to go."

"Yeah," he said. "But what if someone keeps hitting you in the face with a dodge ball?"

I stifled a smile. "I guess you should just pray and ask God what direction you should go."

"I just walked away," he said.

Uh oh. So he wasn't being silly with the question. I asked him what was up, and he told me that a couple of kids at a birthday party he'd attended earlier had decided to pick on him during a dodge ball game. When he walked away (a move for which I heaped hearty praise on him), they followed him out of the dodge ball pavilion and kept trying to peg him with the balls (for which they were chastised by adults present).

"Why do you think those guys were picking on you, Noah?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, flicking his hair out of his face with a quick jerk of his head. "Probably because of my smooth moves."

Costa Rica, Here We Come.

See all these people? This is me with my family, and we're attempting something this summer we've never attempted before:

We're going to Costa Rica on a missions trip.

Are we nuts? Maybe.

But, we are planning to go, and we're planning to go as a family. We're excited about the possibilities this brings forth, especially for the kiddos, most especially for Emma (the pony-tailed one in the back row whose head is next to mine), who felt God call her to be a missionary when she was only five years old and who has already had some deep theological profundity well up from within. We believe God's going to do some crazy stuff in our kids' hearts while on this trip, while simultaneously bonding us as a family and (maybe?) launching us into a new means of ministry. We can't put our fingers on it, but something grand is going to happen to one or more (or all) of us. So we're going.

However: we can't go for free. So we're in the midst of a giant fundraising campaign to try to earn enough money to get there. That's where you, dear Dregs reader, come in.

Please visit the link to our super-awesome fundraising page, hosted at www.firstgiving.com/palmertribe. If you'd like to donate, you can do so there. If you want to get behind our efforts and mention us on your blog, well, that'd be swell. Leave me a link in the comments section and I'll give you a mention on here.

Thanks for your help! Sorry for the shameless plug; I'm planning on posting another Writing Is Easy entry soon (as soon as I write it -- it's so hard!).

Closing The Door.

(This is the full text of an email I sent most of my family and friends earlier today. If you didn't receive it, it's probably because I didn't think of you as I hurriedly assigned email addresses to it. Apologies. It wasn't an intentional slight.)

It is with a heavy heart and a devastated spirit that I write to you today. After months of prayer, counsel, soul-searching, and flat-out arguments with God, Michelle and I have decided to withdraw our adoption case and end that particular part of our lives. The longer we hold on to him, the more it becomes obvious that nothing's going to change in our case, and the more we endanger his chance of being adopted by someone else.

In the African system, once a child becomes five years old, he is pretty much destined to be an orphan for the rest of his life. Sterling is just about a year and a half away from that, and we don’t want to hold on to him at the expense of seeing him go to another family. We love him too much to keep him an orphan.

This has been a long time coming. The writing has been on the wall for months now, but we've refused to admit it or acknowledge it. In retrospect, that refusal has come out of fear rather than faith--we've been too emotionally tied to Sterling for too long, and were thus blinded to the truth and deaf to the voice of God. The reflexive action is to say, "But, but, but..." We've said that a million times. But we know we've done all that we can feasibly do, and the obstacles and roadblocks are still in place. There really is no more we can do at this point, and there hasn't been for some time, so at long last, we've finally come to a place of bewildered, shell-shocked peace and made the difficult decision we knew had to be made.

Still, there's an exhaustive relief to it. This has been a door in our lives that has been open for a long time, so it's painfully nice to be able to close that door and move on in whatever direction God would have us. No, it is not the conclusion we've been hoping for the last two and a half years, but it's a conclusion, and that is sufficient.

And in the end, we remain God's. We don't know why things shook out the way they did, we don't know why God called us to this task only to have it fall apart time and again. We don't know what we're going to tell our children, who have grown up for the last two and a half years talking about their brother Sterling. All we know is that God is faithful, that he is good, that he loves us, and that he loves Sterling more than we do. That boy is too, too precious to remain an orphan, and he's been watching all his friends at the orphanage get adopted out from underneath him. Now he is free to find a family; it just won't be ours.

Thank you so much for walking down this road with us in whatever capacity you did. Thank you for prayers, words of encouragement, financial blessings, and the countless other ways you supported the Palmer Tribe in the midst of our time as Sterling's family. It's going to take some time, grieving this loss, but we're confident that we'll come through the other side of it more in love with Jesus and more in love with each other. It's just the way God works.

May God extend his grace and peace to you in a tangible way today,

--Adam (and Michelle)

It's A Bean!

“Salutations!” said the voice.

Wilbur jumped to his feet. “Salu-what?” he cried.

“Salutations!” repeated the voice.

“What are they, and where are you?” screamed Wilbur. “Please, please, tell me where you are. And what are salutations?”

“Salutations are greetings,” said the voice. “When I say ‘salutations,’ it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning. Actually, it’s a silly expression, and I am surprised that I used it at all. As for my whereabouts, that’s easy. Look up here in the corner of the doorway! Here I am. Look, I’m waving!”

At last Wilbur saw the creature that had spoken to him in such a kindly way. Stretched across the upper part of the doorway was a big spiderweb, and hanging from the top of the web, head down, was a large grey spider. She was about the size of a gumdrop. She had eight legs, and she was waving one of them at Wilbur in friendly greeting. “See me now?” she asked.

“Oh, yes indeed,” said Wilbur. “Yes indeed! How are you? Good morning. Salutations! Very pleased to meet you. What is your name, please? May I have your name?”

“My name,” said the spider, “is Charlotte.”

“Charlotte what?” asked Wilbur, eagerly.

“Charlotte A. Cavatica. But just call me Charlotte.”

“I think you’re beautiful,” said Wilbur.

--E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Wilbur is, of course, right.

Charlotte Anne Palmer (aka "The Bean") was born September 19, 2007. She's healthy, awesome, and all kinds of delightful. She also no longer resembles a bean.

Fact: TV Makes Kids Stupider.

Don't believe me? Check out this article from Time.com, tantalizingly titled "Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All." I have to admit, we've plunked the tots down in front of those videos before, though I often failed to see the appeal. Still, if it was supposed to be, as Homer Simpson might put it, smartening them up, why not?

Oh, but we were wrong, says journalist Alice Park, who tosses out such tasty, guilt-inducing morsels as:

Led by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, both at the University of Washington, the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. "The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew," says Christakis. "These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos."

...and...

Mounting evidence suggests that passive screen sucking not only doesn't help children learn, but could also set back their development. Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen. Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development.

...and, my favorite...

He and other experts worry that the proliferation of these products will continue to displace the one thing that babies need in the first months of life — face time with human beings. "Every interaction with your child is meaningful," says Christakis. "Time is precious in those early years, and the newborn is watching you, and learning from everything you do."

The only flaw I can find in the piece is that Park calls Sesame Street "educational," a claim I've found dubious ever since they introduced that stupid fairy character. She's cute, but I think she exists more to sell ancillary products than to teach my kids how to count to twenty. For a more incisive take on the whole business of that show, check out this flammably titled LA Times article: "Elmo Is An Evildoer."

Two Years And Counting.

Today marks the second anniversary of our adoption process. Two years ago today we contacted Amani Baby Cottage for the first time to tell them we wanted to adopt from Uganda. Two years ago today we set out on this grand journey not knowing when it would be over. Two years.

We still didn't know who we were going to get; we told them we wanted a baby, and that we were pretty sure we wanted a boy (then-three-year-old Noah was certain, however--as we looked at their website gallery, he jumped up and down and said, "Let's buy a boy! Let's buy a boy!"). Little did we know that we would be saddled with a fifteen-month-old boy whom everyone said was the best kid in the orphanage, even though he didn't necessarily meet our parameters.

Two years. As I sit here thinking about it, writing about it, it seems almost like we've always been in the adoption process. We've had soaring highs, and crushing lows, and lots of median time in-between where we felt like we were simply treading water. And now, after two years, I go into Noah's room, and I see the extra bed we've had in there for 730 days or so, always ready to be filled at a moment's notice with his African brother, and I plead with God, "If you won't hear our prayers, please hear those of this little child who just wants his brother home. He just wants to buy a boy."

And in the meantime, we look forward to The Bean, and we carry on with our lives, and we contact our Congressmen and Senators and tug every possible governmental heartstring we can find, and we wait on God to move heaven and Earth and unite this family of ours.

This Is A Giant Tire.

This is not how large The Bean has become, but, to Michelle, it might as well be. The poor gal still has eight weeks of pregnancy left on the schedule, yet has untold number of people coming up to pat her belly and say, "Oh my. When are you due?" When she says, "Mid-September," they always give her that wincing look of pity people give when they feel bad for you. You know the one, like they're tasting spoiled tuna salad on the back of their tongue but are trying to be gracious to the five-year-old child who made the "snack" for them in the first place? That's the look.

I always tell Michelle, when asked "When are you due?," to look back at the person quizzically and say, "Due?" Alas, she has not, to date, done it.

Still, The Bean is on pace and doing well. Perhaps she'll roll right out of there when the time is right. And if she does, what with the other three biologicals, we'll have a complete matched set of tires, plus two spares!

And... perhaps I've carried the metaphor too far.

The Latest On The Little Man.

As I mentioned in another post, our adoption has stalled in the Ugandan court system because of something like six little words in our ruling that need to be removed. We've been given a favorable ruling, but it contained wording that said, essentially, that we had to come back to Uganda in three years to finalize our adoption, and the US doesn't allow such conditions for adoptions. Until those words are removed, we're stuck in a (very long) holding pattern.

Well, we have some tangential good news. Because our entire case has been so screwy, the orphanage started taking their adoptions to another court located in Jinja, which is where the orphanage is located, instead of Kampala, which is the capital city of Uganda. So they had some favorable rulings through the Jinja court, which was good, but those rulings had the same wording ours did, which was bad.

Now in our case, we asked the judges to remove those words from the ruling, and they got very upset with us. In Jinja, however, the lawyer asked for the words to be removed, and the judge was kind about it and actually did it. So there are now two (I think--maybe three) adoptions going through. The rulings have been modified, and the kids are on their way home.

So I think this bodes well for us, in that I can't foresee the high court, who holds our case, wanting to be outdone by a lower court. Of course, I'm thinking logically, which is a mistake when it comes to the Ugandan government. These people love their children, to be sure, but have a difficult time seeing that it would be better for the orphans to be united with their families.

Please keep praying for our adoption. Pray that God would change the hearts of these judges. And pray against child trafficking, which is suddenly very rampant in East Africa, which is causing a lot of these judges to take extra caution in their rulings. And if you think about it, pray for the plane ticket(s) we'll eventually need to purchase to go pick up the little man once our adoption has been granted.

The Bean Is A... Beannette!

If I had a photo, I'd post it here. However, we have unearthed a magnificent fact: The Bean is indeed a girl, or "gel" as they like to call them in the UK.

At this point, The Bean is 15 inches long from head to heel, and is scheduled to be released on September 17, just a few days before Good Luck Chuck and Resident Evil: Extinction. Time will tell, but I believe The Bean will have a greater box office impact in the long run.

How I Made $150 At A Michael W. Smith Concert: A Tutorial.

Boy, the time slips away. If anyone read this, they would be clamoring--clamoring, I say!--for updates. But, as this blog is read, apparently, only by me, my agent, and that crazy cat over at Miscellaneous Creativity, the Clamor Klaxon has not sounded at Dregs HQ.

Nevertheless, I promised a story long ago, so a story I shall deliver!

So Michelle and I got free tickets to see one Mr. Michael W. Smith at a megachurch here in Tulsa, where I happen to lurk. He supposedly wanted to meet with some of the area worship leaders, a title which we can claim, for some purposes of his own design, and, since the tickets were free, we decided to take him up on it.

We did this for two reasons and two reasons only:
Reason #1: to say we met Michael W. Smith because, hey, we could.
Reason #2: to give him a copy of my book Knuckle Sandwich in the hopes that he would say something nice about it.

We did not do this in order to make $150. I cannot stress this enough.

Okay, so we get to the concert, and it turns out that the "Meet 'n' Greet," as they like to call it (yes, the concert organizers swallow the "and" so that it misses the "a" and "d" entirely, leaving only those apostrophes as residuals), is to take place a half-hour before the concert. Good thing we got there early. The whole procedure involves a pair of actual tickets and a pair of fibrous stickers that you attach to your person as proof that you belong backstage.

We slapped on the stickers and headed toward the unmarked door where we were to be ushered backstage along with other worship leaders from our area. When we got to the door, however, we were told the proceedings would be delayed fifteen minutes or so. Having no intention of attending the concert (we had, oddly enough, a worship meeting at church that night to attend), Michelle leaned over to me and said, "Bro, we gotta get rid of these tickets."

First things first: I had to autograph the book for Michael. I wrote: "Michael--Thanks for reading! And thanks for all you do. Love, [random circly thing I draw that indicates my signature]"

Then, it was off to the Will-Call window in the hopes of getting rid of our tickets. As we approached the line, we ran into a friend standing in it and had the following exchange:

Me: What are you doing here?
Friend: Hoping to go to the concert.
Me: You need tickets?
Friend: Yeah.
Me: How many?
Friend: Two.
Me: [Taking tickets out of my pocket] Here you go. We got these free 'cause we're supposedly VIPs and aren't going to use them. You can have them. They're probably good seats.
Friend: [Fishing money out of his wallet] Here. Let me pay you for them.
Me: [Looking at Michelle, wondering if we should take the money]: Nah.
Friend: [Forcing money into my hand]: I already budgeted. Here. Fifty dollars. They're twenty-five apiece.
Me: [Taking money awkwardly]: Okay. Thanks!
Friend: [Walking away happily]: Thank you!

So, that's 33.33% of our earnings for the night, boom, just like that.

As I pocket our fast cash, a dude with semi-slicked-back hair and one of those shiny shirts with a fiery design that people wear at the World Series of Poker walked up to us. He pointed at the fibrous sticker affixed to my chest.

Dude: You guys have those Meet 'n' Greet passes? (Yes, he swallowed the "and," too.)
Me: [Wondering what he's getting at] Yeah. (I turned it up at the very end to make it question-ish, but not enough to merit a complete question mark in print.)
Dude: You're gonna meet Michael?
Me: Yeah.
Dude: [Producing a manilla folder with writing on it and a small Sharpie marker attached to it with string] Would you mind getting something signed for me? I'll give you a hundred bucks.
Me: [Looking at Michelle and communicating wordlessly with her]. Sure thing.

So there you go. We took the guy's item (it was a photo of him and Michael W. Smith, blown up to 8x10 size) backstage, got Michael to sign it, and brought it back out to him for a pocket-sized portrait of Benjamin Franklin.

Not bad for a night's work, eh?

Oh, and we got to meet Michael W. Smith and get a copy of his new worship song on CD. He really would like for us to perform it at our church. No word yet on how much it's worth to him.

Happy Birthday, Sterling.

Nothing's changed on the adoption front, but I thought everyone would enjoy this photo of the little man. He turns three today. We were originally hoping to have him home before this day hit--we wanted to celebrate with him--but now we're just going to have to change that. Perhaps we should start hoping he's home before he turns four.

The Wushy-Cushy.

Noah, my five-year-old son, recently traded in a bunch of Incredible Pizza tickets for an item so hilariously awesome in its sheer guy-ness that I had to share.

He calls it the "Wushy-Cushy."

The Wushy-Cushy is a balloon-like device, often made of rubber, but in Noah's case, made of green plastic cloth-like material. He demonstrated it for me immediately by blowing into it to inflate it about halfway. He then, right there in the middle of Incredible Pizza, placed it on the floor and proceeded to sit on it.

It looked kind of like this:

Of course, it was hilarious. Flatulence noises always are.

But what struck me especially dumb was Noah's innate desire to simulate the sound of passing gas. I have not instructed him in this. Neither has Michelle. This incident has simply placed in me a deep-rooted knowledge that the males of our species are genetically predisposed to laughing hysterically at fart noises, which is perhaps why such sounds pervade so many of the so-called comedies on display at the nearest cinema.

Of course, Noah laughs because he's only five.

These Are Cantaloupes.

So, The Bean is roughly the size of a cantaloupe, and is starting to develop its teeth, even though the teeth won't push through the gums until after it's born.

Also, The Bean is still an "it," as we had an ultrasound and couldn't get a clear image either way as to its gender. The Bean is not very cooperative in that respect; it adores mystery and abhors technology. It's very cantankerous even when the doctor and/or nurses attempt that monthly ritual of finding the fetal heart tones.

However, we're attempting to find an excuse to have another ultrasound done in a few weeks so we can know. Michelle and I personally don't care about finding out whether The Bean is a brother or sister for the other kiddos, but they care immensely. Mainly, they're all hoping for a boy, and if it's a girl, we want to give them plenty of time to get used to the idea before it's born. I'd hate for the first thing they say about their new baby sister to be "Aw, man!"

So, until then, slice up some cantaloupe, the perfect summer treat!

These Are Sweet Potatoes.

So, mangoes are slightly smaller than sweet potatoes, you know. Anyway, The Bean is about the size of a large sweet potato, and is looking more and more like an actual person every day. Plus, as an extra, extra bonus feature, Michelle is feeling The Bean's activity. I felt it just the other day, too, but it was like being kicked by a feather.

Of course, as time wears on, The Bean will make more of a ruckus, and Michelle will be super-tired of those prenatal aerobics that fetuses tend to engage in. But for now, we're just enjoying it.

The Question.

Emma, my seven-year-old, delayed bedtime the other night with a question.

"Dad," she said, "I have a question."

I wanted to be the dutiful dad, but I was a little perturbed that she'd rolled out of bed--she was supposed to be asleep. Nevertheless: "Shoot."

"Well, I don't know exactly? What the question is?" She talks like that sometimes, turning her words up at the ends of phrases, so it sounds like a bunch of questions. I'm sincerely hoping she grows out of it.

"You don't know what the question is?" I said. "Like, you don't know how to ask it?"

"Right. Like my mind? Can't think of the right words?"

"Why don't you just use whatever words come to mind," I said, "and we'll figure it out from there."

No go. She literally did not have the words to express her question. All she could say was, "It's about mankind." Oh, and this: "It's like my heart? Is asking the question? And my mind? Can't figure it out." She brushed her hair out of her face. "It does have to do with God, though."

I decided to offer a suggestion. "Is it, like, about the meaning of life?"

She moved her hand like she was waving off the suggestion. "Well, kinda. But..." and here she trailed off, and I wished her forehead was transparent, because I could tell her brain was working overtime to express whatever feelings she was feeling. "I just... my mind? Can't get any rest."

I sent her back to bed, and she continued to ruminate on the question for the rest of the night. Dutifully, I went upstairs to tuck her in, and this is when things got a little crazy.

"Maybe you'll figure out your question while you're sleeping," I offered.

She smiled. "I hope. It's like my heart is asking the question and my brain isn't following. Like I've been digging in the dirt, and I hit, like, a hard thing? Like cement or something? And I've been digging with a shovel? So I need to, you know, change tools."

Now it was my turn to smile. "What does that mean?"

"I just have to go back to the beginning and figure out what pieces of the puzzle I do know, then use those to figure out the question."

Did I mention she's seven?

Boy, I felt hopeless, as a father. I desperately wanted her to be able to articulate this question, but I couldn't figure out how. Fortunately, I didn't try to force anything--at least I had that much going for me. I just let her know that God was giving her that question, and that he would help her figure out what it was in due time.

I left the room to check on her brother, then came back for a little more spiritual discussion. "Dad," she said, "I figured out something. The puzzle pieces? Those are, like, memory verses, and other parts of God's word. And the cement? That's, like, the devil? And sin? So that's how I can figure out the question."

You know what I said? "Emma, someday very soon, you're going to be teaching me."

She had two other things, though: "Dad, when I do figure out the question?" And here she smiled so big--I wish you could've seen it--"I'm going to tell everyone around me."

The other thing: "I know why God's doing this. Because I'm going to be a missionary..." (A quick aside: Emma has known, since the age of five, that she's going to be a missionary. We trust her.) "... and so God is teaching me how to, you know, follow him when it's hard? Because that's what missionaries have to do."

I have no doubt that Emma and God are pretty tight. It will serve her well in her missions efforts.

And in that moment, I also had no doubt about God's love for me. Because I had such a swell of boundless love in my heart for my daughter, and the thought struck me: I love my daughter this much, and it's impossible for me to love her more than God, so he must love her even more, though I can't even comprehend that amount of love. And if he loves her that way, he must love me that way.

The thing about our spiritual conversation that really struck me was the way Emma was able to share The Question, to participate in The Question--that same Question we all have, in one way or another. The Question of God, and the way our hearts, whether we know it or not, are always on the lookout for Him. And sometimes we find Him with our hearts but mislabel Him with our brains, calling Him "knowledge" or "the delicacy of a feather" or "a crimson sunset" or "a '67 Mustang."

So let's bring this whole story home: What is your Question? Do you even know you're asking?

These Are Mangoes.

So, The Bean is now slightly larger than your average large mango. And I'm fast running out of foodstuffs to compare it to.

For those of you interested, we shall know The Bean's gender on April 23. I'll try to post as soon as we find out.

Also, mangoes are really good for you, especially as a combatant against viruses. If you have anything viral, bump up your mango intake and you'll knock it right on out. This message brought to you by the National Council of Mango-Related Health Solutions, dedicated to your Mango Health Needs.