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Strange Twists
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"Writing to Inspire..."
Strange Twists. I never thought in 1985 when my husband left me for an "older" woman, that twenty years later, I would be content to remain single. I also never thought I would be a single mom with two kids. Not his kids, but two daughters that I adopted from Nepal and Vietnam. I never thought I would have a positive pregnancy test either. After all, I couldn't get pregnant when I was married. But I did—last year when I went into the hospital to undergo some surgery which shall remain nameless. As I anxiously waited on a gurney to undergo the knife, the nurse came running up to me and asked, "Are you sure you aren't pregnant?" Just the sort of question you expect to be asked when you are fixing to endure a major procedure. For a split second, I did wonder, God, what you are trying to tell me? Could I be the second immaculate conception? My doctor later told me the machine was broken. I tried to tell them, "No, I am not pregnant." They gave me the darn test twice. It was positive both times. I even had to pay the bill for it. Things happen. Life has a way of not turning out exactly like we planned. But along with all the strange twists that can leave us shaking our heads, God is busy being God. He is the Creator, despite some claims to the contrary, and I know that because He created me, and I know I didn't come from a monkey. He actually thought about me eons ago, before the foundations of the world. He thought about you, too.
Old age has a way of mellowing you. Or maybe kids have a way of making you forget all the unimportant things. You know you are getting senile when you can find an airplane seat from a plane trip you took ten years ago but you can’t find your power bill from last month. That got me thinking about all the things that had happened since I took that plane trip to Vietnam in 1999. Maybe I should write something down about the adoption journey of my daughters before all the files in my brain are full and it starts deleting things I am not ready to forget. I cleaned out a drawer today that contained a diary I wrote over twenty years ago. If I had known then what I know now—it must be hard to be God and know the wonderful plans He has for us, and yet still be patient (why couldn't God have given me that wonderful virtue), waiting to bring redemption, or to bring good out of what was meant for evil. The process of reforming our dreams—through pain and suffering; there is no other way. What is the “stuff” of dreams? It was July 20, 1969. As I stood in
the darkness, my gaze fixed on the brightest object in the night sky, I imagined I could see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
walking on the moon's surface. President John F. Kennedy had instilled a dream for our country during a 1961 speech: "I
believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to the Earth." As a nation, we were all glued to our black and white television screens as Neil
Armstrong stepped off the ladder that historic night and landed on the moon's surface. His words, "That's one small step
for man, one giant leap for mankind,” resonated with my undaunting spirit—that of a fourteen year old girl addicted
to "Start Trek" and in love with Captain James T. Kirk. I believed I could "go where no man [or
woman] had gone before." Whether it was chasing aliens on distant planets or becoming the next Jacques Cousteau, blended
in with my addiction to too many mystery and science fiction books, it was the recipe for a nerdy girl who believed she could
do anything.
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