It’s harvest season. Apples are ready for picking. Pumpkins decorate porches to remind us that the growing season of summer is over. Instead, we enjoy rest and plenty, well for city dwellers who go to market and buy fresh produce. For those who have farms, it means something else- preparing the produce to last through the winter. Canning. Freezing. Sweating over steamy pots.

Adoption is like this. We long for harvest season when all the hard days are behind us and the autumn glory is revealed. It doesn’t work that way. We parents are the farmers of adoption. During the spring, we plant seeds-of connection, of prayer and time. All summer, we weed out attitudes (mine), disconnectedness, hording, rejection, survival behaviors and ______ (fill in the blank).

Then one glorious day, autumn blooms.

It blazes.

It brings hope.

It brings fruit.

Rest.

Recoup.

It’s not over. As we parents enjoy the beauty, the pinpricks of light. A child shows a glimpse of attachment. A hug. An “I love you”. Trust.

The fruit like the apples above sit in baskets. 

Beautiful.

Unless I leave them there. Then they rot.

I pull out the apple peeler/corer/slicer and go to work.

Harvest season brings work if we are going to use those apples.

Harvest season brings work if we are going to continue to help our hurt children heal.

Fruit is best ripe.

Leave it to rot and  I will have a mushy, smelly, fruit-fly attracting mess.

How do we continue the harvest season in our children?

We keep working. We keep praying. When there is a pinprick of light. Write it down. Rejoice in it. Remember it. Be thankful for the harvest. Look back at your journal writings of fruitful days when you are in the winter season.

Remember, this is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice, be glad in it.

When regression rears its ugly head, it doesn’t make the day bad.

It makes the good day cry for grace, more grace to remove the mountain of obstacles.

When we have a stretch of days, weeks or a month full of disruptions, meltdowns (Mom and child), it sends us to our knees. Fasting becomes appealing. We long for the fast the looses bonds. Breaks yokes. And the kind that keeps us from running and hiding from our own flesh (children).

Just as the bee pollinates the flower, difficulty makes us grow.Raising children is the best flesh-killer on the planet. Raising adopted, hurt children gets and exponent by that flesh-killer number, it requires scientific notation.

Enjoy the season. Enjoy the steamy hard work that sends us to our knees.

Watch the Lord work as He pours out His grace in the time of need.

Fast and watch the Lord answer.

Watch yourself change.