Happy Sweet 16, Jamie-Noel

It’s hard to believe if you were here, we’d be doing things like getting you ready for your driver’s test, planning a huge birthday party, preparing for grade 11.  I imagine you’d be working at camp over the summer and we’d miss you terribly, maybe even miss your birthday-day but celebrate with you when you came home to do laundry and sleep til it was time to go back for another week.  We can only imagine you playing the piano, or not, maybe you’d have your Dad’s love of gardening, and write, write, write like some days like your Mom feels like she has to, just to get it all out.  You’d probably be binge-watching something on Netfl!x and texting your friends.  I wonder if you’d be dating or if you’d be like your Mom and Dad were way back when, lots of friends, no one special.

We know that life with you would have been amazing and wonderful, but God had other plans.  He chose heaven for you before we ever met, and still, each year as we hang your special ornaments, we remember that He’s got you even though we don’t.

And you know what?  Mom and Dad are okay.  Great really.  God brought two extraordinary people into our lives in ways that, when we tell the stories, we can hardly believe how it happened ourselves.  And although we miss you still, and sometimes still work through stuff related to you not being here, we also know that we are stronger, wiser, more compassionate and resilient for having known you, and lost you, and received the precious gifts of two more children to know and love and care for as long as God gives us that privilege.

And it’s even so much more.  The people ~ families ~ that come with these children, not born of us, but still your sister and brother, well, they are extraordinary too.  As much as we long for you still, we know that our world has expanded exponentially because we were asked to step out of the comfort of what we knew to experience the world in other ways.  That’s what adoption, and knowing our kids’ other families have brought to us, so much that we never knew we needed to know, to be all we were created to be.

So Dear Sweet Child, we look forward to the day we get to see your face for the first time when you welcome us to heaven, hopefully still a little while from now.

But for now, Happy Sweet Sixteen, Our Jamie-Noel.

God is good.