Archives for September 2008

Well, adopting 2 kids puts a lot of family stuff back on the front burner. Which is where most of it should be anyway. What I really mean is that the family machine can be a little rusty in some areas if you have some fudge room. However 2 more lives in our home pushes the limits of space/time and forces me to deal with some things I could otherwise ignore in my own self, my own marriage, and my family. There’s just no room to hide our inadequacies in the closet or shove them under the carpet. It all must be dealt with in order to bring about health.

So far, it’s forced me back into some family life reading:

• I’ve re-read two great reads on keeping family first: Choosing to Cheat by Andy Stanley and What Matters Most by Doug Fields. Both basically challenge me to say no to all the right things so I can say yes to all the best things. Both are great, quick, and insightful reads.

• I’ve also just finished reading Patrick Lencioni’s newest book: The Three Big Questions for a frantic family. I bought it the day it hit the news stands the felt need was so high in my life. Shannon is now reading it and then I’m hoping we’ll put it into full practice. (More on that in a future post I’m sure) It’s a leadership parable that reads easy and applies some business planning tools to the most important organization on earth: the family. And if you ask me, it’s a MUST READ for all families in the United States that I’m aware of. I believe it will really help our family have a basis and clear directive for how and why we make the choices we do. I found myself saying, “dude, that’s us” about 50 times as I read this little book.

This transition has also brought to the surface 3 critical things I need to come to grips with in my life:

• ALONE TIME: I need alone time to be healthy. I often don’t get enough of this- just time for me to read, pray, think, sleep, dream, etc. I need to schedule and block out regular time to keep myself healthy. When I let the demands of family and ministry push this away, I jeopardize my ability to be a healthy part of the process and instead become part of the problem. I get cranky, dissatisfied, and start living by the demands of the day instead of my priorities. I’m learning to say no to stuff to keep this time sacred. In fact, this past week I said no to a wedding, 4 ministry tasks that I needed to get done but I had no time to do (God brought others instead!), and a post-season soccer coaching request. But I still have a ways to go.

• MARRIAGE TIME: My marriage requires and deserves time. Maybe you are super-married people and this is a duh for you, but sometimes, due to the demands of parenting, money, and ministry- our marriage can get our leftover time. There are clothes to wash and mouths to feed and lawns to mow and bills to pay- and it all takes time- and sometimes in comes out of “our” time. I’ve uniquely felt the sting of this in the past month as the pressure and demands of the adoption process increase- it’s forcing us/me to evaluate what gets my time and what does not. My marriage must get some of my best time, not extra time. This is not bonus if it happens, it is a failure when it does not.

• THE DOMINOE EFFECT: Yeah, I suck at dominoes. There, I said it. I suck at acknowledging how one decision affects another in 2 major areas: my time and my money. I’m learning to get better at this, but it’s hard to always say no to a “last minute phone call” that inadvertantly means I now have to rush to get home for dinner, when the later was way more important than the former anyway. It’s hard to take note of how swinging by and grabbing a cup of coffee affects the bottom line of a gallon of gas or even how much gas I have to play with since I drove to get java. It all dominoes into other stuff and adding two more kids into the mix is forcing me to deal with this issue in my life: I need to daily monitor the downstream affects of my small decisions on the big picture of sanity and priority.

Last week I figured out I could post pictures on my facebook profile through iphoto with a cool little application addative I watched a friend use.

So today I googled “facebook iphoto” and up came a link to this lovely doodad I installed. Then with one click, I instantly was able to put an entire album of 46 pictures up, add captions if I wanted to, and tag friends in them who are also on facebook all in a matter of like 5 minutes.

How stinkin cool is that!

Well, as many of you who read this blog already know, we went to Uganda this summer as a family to work with an orphanage and the people in the some surrounding villages. You also know that we took 11 students and 4 adults from my youth ministry with us. You also know that we stayed for a few weeks after that team left and had some family vacation.

You may also know that we visited our World Vision sponsor child while there. We got to meet Geoffrey face to face, hang out with him for an hour or so, and bring he and his family some much needed supplies.

However, what you may not know is that while in Jinja one morning, the following conversation took place.

Shannon on her way out of the shower one morning: “Brian, God gave me two names.”

Me: “Um, ok.”

Wife: “Becky and Billy.”

Me: “Ok.”

Then I went to breakfast.

I then arrive at breakfast to the following conversation like 5 minutes later.

My students are now talking to Mandy- the director of the orphanage we’re working in. They ask, “Hey Mandy, which of the kids in the orphanage are adoptable right now?”

Mandy: “Well we have so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so. And that’s all right now.”

Mandy pauses.

Mandy continues: “But, I have a few others I think I’m going to try and see if we can get permission to have someone adopt them. There is one set of true twins who are the last of the children in the orphanage since the day I took it over some 5 years ago. I have not seen their father in 4 years and have never met their mom. Their names are Becky and Billy.”

My heart stops.

Wife looks at me across the room both looking a little freaked and a little excited.

…………

Now, fast forward 6 weeks.

………..

After much prayer, counsel, struggle, stress, fear facing, encouragement, research, and gut checking, we as a couple and a family with our boys have agreed to follow God’s leading into adoption.

So, it’s official, we are now in the full swings of the process of adopting 2 more kids. They are a boy/girl set of twins who are 6 months younger than jake (or 5 and 1/2). Her name is Becky. His name is Billy.

That’s right, the “B.B.” initial count is about to triple in the berry family.

So now, perhaps you have some questions. What follows are a series of “FAQ’s” people have asked or wondered about:

Q: ARE YOU CRAZY?
A: No… ok, well maybe. Um… fine. Yes. It’s nuts.

Q: ARE YOU SURE GOD GAVE SHANNON THOSE NAMES?
A: Believe me, I drilled my wife on if she’d had some previous conversation with Mandy and what not. God is whispering kid names to my wife in the shower. I’m not sure if that’s ok, but God seems to not be too concerned about it.

Q: DID YOU JUST GET SOME CRAZY EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT WORKING AT THE ORPHANAGE AND NOW YOU ARE FOLLOWING THROUGH ON THIS?
A: Nope. No emotional attachment in this story. No great memory that we had that tugged our heart strings for weeks. Just simply God’s call, though the heart strings are coming as time goes on and as we pray more about this.

Q: IS THIS OUT OF THE BLUE?
A: Yes and No. Yes, cuz we didn’t plan this or even seek it out. No, because we have talked about the possibility of adopting a daughter ever since we decided to be done having kids the old fashioned way after Jake. Yes, because we never thougtht it would be 2 more kids. No, because God is opening too many doors to be coincidence.

Q: DID YOU MEET BECKY AND BILLY?
A: Yep, we did. But never as the, “hey, these people are going to adopt you people.” Just casually like we did with all the other kids.

Q: ARE YOU AWARE THEY WILL BE CALLED THE “BLACK BERRIES”
A: Yep. Kinda cute now. I’m sure they’ll need to know Karate to keep it from being a regular part of their Middle School years.

Q: DO YOU HAVE A PICTURE?
A: Yep, here it is. We did take a “family” picture with lots of sibling sets so as not to tip them off as to our process or mindset in case things changed as we returned home. We had shared the story with Mandy and she suggested this step as it was going to be needed as a piece of the adoption process if we continued along this path.

Q: WHAT DOES THIS COST?
A: Um a bunch. Like thousands. Less than 50G, more than 10G. God has so far already shown us he’s going to provide for this need. We have had about 1/3 of our money come in already through some very Holy Spirit led ways and this blog post is the “first official notice” of this life transition.

Q: WHEN WILL THIS HAPPEN?
A: We’re shooting to leave January 7, 2009. We’ll be in Uganda for for up to 5 weeks, returning to the states in early February.

Q: HOW CAN I HELP?
A: 3 ways:

1. If you’re in the area, we’re gonna need more baby sitters 🙂
2. Um, we could always use lots of prayer, now more than ever.
3. Also, if you’d like to join us with the financial part of this, we’d welcome any support you feel led to offer. Shoot me an e-mail and I’ll send you an address where you can send a tax deductible check if you are in that boat.

Lots more blog posts to come I’m sure. Hold on, we’re going for a ride.

I’m not a big believer in the bulletin method of announcements. My church is one that can have between 5 and 10 pieces of loose paper in every bulletin every week- so they are easy to ignore.

But, last week, it worked. No joke. It worked.

I put a flyer that read: “We are missing a few pieces, and it just might be you.”

Below I listed 4 blue collar jobs and a brief description of the job that I needed help with. I specifically didn’t say it was for students because I didn’t want them thinking I needed youth or that they had to love kids in order to help. I asked for the following 4 people:

• CARPENTER/CABINET MAKER
• SEAMSTRESS
• ELECTRICIAN
• WELDER/PAINTER

By the time Sunday was over, God brought me everyone but the electrician. I’m not kidding. I had a welder/painter who owns his own car body shop come and tell me that he has attended journey for over a year and not served and this was the perfect job for him. He’s stoked to do it.

I had a grandma take a curtain home to repair it on Monday.

Then tonight I spoke with a cabinet maker on the phone. I have built 5 cabinets for our high school room so far: a sound booth, a check in booth, a game cabinet, and 2 kitchen lowers. But I have two sets of upper kitchen cabinets that have been waiting to be built in my garage. I’ve been tripping over for 18 months because I can’t find or make the time to finish it for church and now it’s going away. TOMORROW! I’m taking it to Journey and a professional cabinet maker is taking it off my hands.

I think I danced when I got off the phone. I might have even screamed. It was such a victory.

AS A RESULT, THERE ARE AT LEAST THREE LEADERSHIP LESSONS/REMINDERS FOR ME IN THIS:

• ASK FOR HELP. People really want to serve- especially those who think “God can’t use my skill set in the church.”

• ASK FOR HELP MORE OFTEN. I end up doing more than I should because I’m too quick to say, “I could do that”. (The honest truth is I can do all of those tasks. I can sew, paint, weld, wire lights, and build a cabinet. Problem is, based on my leadership demands, I shouldn’t be doing any of them right now.)

• WORK SMART FIRST, WORK HARD SECOND. It took work to find the help. It just took me working smarter, and in the end, it turned out to be way less work than doing it myself. I should know that by now. But it’s taken 14 years of knocking the stupid out of me to find this victory moment.

THANKS JESUS. THANKS JOURNEY VOLUNTEERS. YOU ROCK. I LITERALLY COULD NOT DO THIS WITHOUT YOU.

I found myself randomly encouraged in the last 2 days by two really random sources.

1. I read this article which I found on Marko’s blog. I used it in my message on Sunday to challenge our students to consider what it says or doesn’t say about the idea that “everyone matters.” In my opinion, it is an article about an act that is degrading to women in the clearest way and presses the issue of “everyone matters” in some negative ways. However, the more I thought about it, it’s also one of the greatest encouragements I think a young woman might have today. It demonstrates that our secular culture believes that a woman in her 20’s who has held onto her virginity possesses such a rare commodity that it is worth at least $250,000. Consequently, when [in this case] I challenge the young women in our ministry take their virginity into marriage, they take a gift that even our non-believing society acknowledges is both immensely valuable and extremely rare. In a backwards way, that’s encouraging.
2. Tonight I was reading for seminary and had the Jets vs. Charger game on, but without volume. So at one point I looked up, just in time to see Brett Favre throw an interception that was then promptly taken back for a Charger touchdown. In the next frame, while the Chargers celebrate, Farve is shown on the screen with this title “NFL record holder for most career interceptions: 290“. I immediately was encouraged. If a man who is surely headed for the NFL hall of fame as a quarterback can hold such a horrible record and still be regarded as one of the best of all time, there is hope. I can be a total screw up in some areas and still be considered immensely valuable. In a backwards way, that’s encouraging too.