I mentioned before that we now feel like the time we spent in Alabama helped prepare us for our adoption.We learned alot about hospitality, opening our hearts to others, and growing with others in community. We were also led to a wonderful church that was full of people who had hearts for orphan care. But one of the most influential preparations that took place during that year was severing our hearts from our "stuff". If you know us personally, you probably know that we have been blessed with a reasonably sized house. When Jared first purchased it and moved in, many people worried about him and his one bedroom apartment's worth of furniture in what we considered this "big" empty house. Nobody had to worry. This old house is full. Full of love, fun, laughter, family, and "stuff". Stuff we need. Or so we thought. :)
See, in Alabama, we lived in a fully furnished apartment. It came with furniture, linens, dishes, etc. So when we moved down, we took some of our own stuff with us, but alot of it sat in this big old house unused for a whole year. And we learned some things. I learned that I don't really need 10 casserole dishes. We don't need 5 couches. We don't need to store boxes of clothes that we may never wear again in the basement for just in case. We don't need a whole separate room for an office. We don't need to keep everything anyone else has ever gifted us. And the list goes on. After living simply (for us) for a year, we were so excited to come home to our stuff. But we were overwhelmed and unhappy when we got back and we couldn't figure out why. Then it hit us. All this stuff is suffocating us.
By now, you're probably wondering how this applies to our adoption. Well, it's perfect that our hearts have been prepared to part with our stuff. Because adoption costs money. A pretty large amount of money, actually. A large enough amount that we don't exactly have it all just sitting around. So Jared and I have been going room by room as we have the opportunity and pulling out our stuff to sell. Some of it has been really easy, like those extra casserole dishes and those clothes we didn't wear for a year and that lamp that doesn't match the kid's room anymore.
Some of it has been very hard, emotionally, to get rid of. I've been going through baby things that we don't use anymore and selling them. It has not been easy. It's silly, but my heart wants to hang on to those sweet little outfits that Gracie wore when she was so tiny. The first bag of her baby clothes that sold maybe brought a tear or two to my eyes. But as much as my heart wants to hang onto those things, my heart also wants to bring our baby home from China. So every dollar I put in that special envelope makes me sing a little.
I honestly do not know if we would have been so open to doing this, if we had not spent that year being separated from our stuff. If we had not learned the lesson that people are so much more important than things. I'm not saying it's easy. But it's easier than it would have been a couple years ago. And it's going to be so worth it. So worth it.
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