Today, during nap time, I took to cleaning up my phone. I deleted ancient voice mails, sent superfluous emails to the trash bin, and made a couple adjustments to the app “folders” on my home screen.
Then, I opened my voice memo recorder and found the most delightful thing: recordings of our son at 3.5 months, cooing and chattering away.
My breath caught in my throat and tears filled my eyes. My heart longed for those days, and I felt like they were years ago . . . except . . . they happened five months ago.
Have I been living in a time warp? How has he changed so much in such a short period of time? How did he go from that itty bitty nugget, kicking his jingly owl under his play gym, to the always-on-the-go almost-little-boy that constantly explores our house? (A church nursery worker called him the “Baby Tornado,” if that gives you a picture.)
I’ve listened to his raspy voice 5 times now, because I am enraptured. I can still feel his weight, like a feather in my arms, as he locked eyes with me that day. I can recall the tenderness of his sweet newborn skin. Most days, I remain shocked and amazed and thankful to God that He let us be E’s parents, but I can see where the novelty of it has begun the slow fade into the daily routine of spoon-feeding and diaper changes and reading books, all snug in my lap, and zipping up his soft sleep sack, to tuck him into his crib.
But I don’t want to lose my fascination with how the Lord brought E into our family. I’m acutely aware that time is flying past us at incredible speed, and I find that I don’t want to miss a single thing. I’ve had friends say they wish they had cherished certain things while their children were young, instead of wishing the next (hopefully easier) stage would hurry along. I’m heeding their wisdom; I want to commit every single stage to memory, soak up every snuggle and joy and opportunity to comfort E. Because all of these moments have been (and will be) tools God used to sharpen me and make me more like Jesus. I want to remember His powerful acts, and E is a living, breathing, beautiful reminder of them. God knows that my heart is prone to wander, bent towards forgetting how He acted and sliding my own self-sufficiency into places reserved for God alone. He gave me a tangible reminder. This is one of my favorite things about adoption; I can’t say I did anything to become E’s mama.
God did it. He worked in a thousand tiny ways, in our hearts and in our circumstances, to grow our family with this wonderful little boy. All praise be to God!
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!” Psalm 103:1
Always Anchored 
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