Happy New Year! We want to share our gratitude for all the people who have been asking for updates on our adoption. We are still waiting to be matched, and although the process can feel never ending, we are trying to remain anchored in the promise of His perfect timing and hope that we will meet Baby M #2 in 2022!
Katie and I have been talking about the virtue of hope for some time now and how it is something we feel God is calling on us to give him during this time of waiting.
I have two close friends who have both said individual things about hope that I have relied on many times during our journey with infertility and adoption. The first comes from a mentor of mine, Adam. We were talking about the virtue of hope when I needed it back in 2014. I felt like God was asking me a lot across multiple latitudes of my life, and I was lacking hope. Adam simply said, “Hope is arguably the most important of the cardinal virtues, Joe… faith clings to hope while love rests on it.” Without hope, we cannot properly have faith or love.
The other memorable conversation about hope came from my sister Maria. At the very beginning of our journey where we realized it wasn’t going to be easy to grow our family, we called her and my brother-in-law to talk and pray together. Maria shared something she heard in a homily where the priest said, “Hope is the one virtue that is most baffling to the devil. It makes sense to see what the Lord has done in people’s lives and to have faith and love, but to look out at our world, to see the brokenness that exists and to still hope is what is baffling to the Devil.”
As beautiful as I can make hope sound, the truth remains that it is incredibly hard to practice. It is really only required when things aren’t going our way. When things are good, hope is easy because we see the fruits of our previous hope and in the moment… what more is there to hope for? When things are rough or when there is some sort of lack in our lives, that is when hope is required and must be put into practice. Hope is not a fleeting emotion, much less an attitude that fades when life is hard, but a resilient stance toward life marked by trust, confidence, and perseverance.
Through the entire journey of fertility with its medical tests & surgeries, miscarriages, Xavier’s adoption, and now this one, we have been called to hope. And without a doubt I believe that we have grown in hope. As I like to joke with Katie, we have no choice but to hope. Hope is our “yes” to God right now. It is our promise to Him and the renewal of our commitment to being His disciples no matter what. Hope empowers us to live differently because a Christian understanding of hope is rooted in the unshakable conviction that God loves us and wants our good, a fact memorably exclaimed by Paul’s declaration in Romans: “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (8:31).
This is the hope that Katie and I bring towards the new year and pray for each of you to have as well.
Thank you for your prayers and continued encouragement. We pray that your hope may be strengthened in Jesus, and that you are able to live out hope in a world that needs it desperately.
-Joe