If you are here because you prayed over us and followed our latest adoption story or were able to read the Miracles of Life Series #1 #2 #3 #4 and #5 recorded here which documented my family’s anointed journey to our Gift of New Goodness, our beautiful and sweet Eviemira JunTova, then I hope you will linger in this page while I share the rest of the story that is forever unfolding with God’s light in the darkness… the unwrapping of a NEW Tova in a distant land that is so close to our hearts. This is the continuation of the sacred story of how the Lord hunted us down in the valley of the shadow of death and revealed a gift of light in our darkest midnight of our souls that would take our broken hearts 1/2 way around the world, as a family, to witness a sacred glimpse of God’s Splendor.
God’s stories are never done.
If you have not read the whole series, I would love to ask you to pull up a chair, grab a cup tea with me, and let’s lean into a story, so you can fully appreciate this glorious unfolding of this part #6 : a crashing together of all the broken and all the beautiful in a holy mess of God’s mighty Saving Grace.
Because…Only God.
Only God can write a new Goodness of Beauty that can bloom from the landscape of such ruins.
Only God can birth a new language of praise from the depths of a gut-wrenching painful lament.
Only our victorious and loving God can grow a holy glimpse of a Wild Hope from a wasteland of tragedy.
Only our God can pour out such a balm of grace over hemorrhaging and grieving hearts.
Only God.
Here is a sacred story about new life blooming out of a broken Garden…..
This is what the gift and goodness of new Life looks like….
It is a straight-up undeserving, God-sized Miracle when the deepest darkest pain can be turned into the deepest outpouring and gift of HOPE and LIGHT.
The sunflowers in the photo above are for our Gia-Bia. Her life will always point us to The Light Of Life…which will, in turn, point us to our true purpose on this earth….even in the depths of our pain. Oh how we miss her smile and giggles among her siblings. Her forever joy and life and light are a constant reflection of our LIVING HOPE. She and her brave life grows us forever and teaches us to turn to the light of TRUTH and to invest in eternity and to keep fighting for hope for others.
Her little sissy, Our Eviemira, has a name that is translated to mean THE MIRACLE and goodness OF NEW LIFE. She is a Miracle born from the light of Gia’s life. What an honor to embrace such Tova (hebrew for Goodness). A New grace of goodness in the land of the living.
Light from LIGHT. Hope from HOPE. Love from LOVE. This is grace…. all grace. Gianna’s forever heartbeat bearing new gifts of life straight from the gift of her life!
We are so in love and in awe.
She is A miracle of pure LIGHT.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)
The Truth that keeps lighting up our darkness is that our God is no less God in the shadows and no less faithful in the valleys… He is never done revealing a story that gives holy glimpses behind the veil to testify to the rescuing Truth of a GREATER redemption to come… a future hope when He will make ALL THINGS NEW. He gives peeks into His providence through a wild glimpse at redemption here on earth… just a peek to keep our hearts beating with a HOPE that will never disappoint.
While we wait, in our broken gardens, for the great Redemption of all that is wrecked in this world, He writes and reveals pages that have a thread of victory laced through the pain filled chapters. Glimpses of a greater Victory to come over the curse of death. Death loses.
It was in the blackest midnight of our souls, just months after walking our Gianna to Jesus, that God whispered a radical calling. He only gave a glimpse to our hearts… just enough manna to take a bold step forward in the dark towards a shining star that would defy the enemy’s great goal to keep us in the pit of despair. A miracle that would stomp on satan’s head to declare that DEATH DOES NOT WIN. Death does not have the final say.
God had a bigger plan to bring Life from death. He had a plan to take the greatest and bloodiest pain our our lives to birth a gift of New Life. THIS WAS NOT a plan to remove our pain, NOT a plan to fill a never-fillable hole of our precious Gianna, Not a plan to heal a forever earthly wound (that only heaven can heal). Not any of this is His plan on earth, and not possible until heaven, when all things will be made new and all voids and heart holes will be filled. But, His plan, for us as we wait, was to give a pinhole glimpse behind the great veil between Heaven and Earth where He is weaving a tapestry of victory beyond our wildest dreams. Just a peek to keep us holding on and trusting the broken garden to the Master gardener. Where only He can turn tragedy into Triumph. A plan to part the red sea to a little girl who needed hope too. A plan to bring a balm of love to grow beauty around our greatest loss…and to let our grief bear gifts of New Life and Love and Light. To let grief catapult us to more miracles. To let LOVE propel us into the light.
This is Hope poured out in her life and ours through a way of providence that will never make sense or be reconciled this side of eternity. But, we choose to let His pen carry us through a story….a story of defiant joy in the face of despair.
Defiant and radical miracles in the face of the enemy’s blow of death.
ONLY GOD. All HIS Grace.
We heard His whisper, by Grace we heard His still small voice through our loud laments of anger and tears. We heard His voice in our broken Garden to dig and believe for New Life, while still bleeding from our earthly loss. A calling to let the blood of our bleeding hearts feed seeds of new life. A calling to be “given in our brokenness” and to allow God to take the pressing and crushing of our souls to bear new wine.
We kept the secret hidden close to our hearts as we walked the wilderness towards a Tova that we could not even imagine or see beyond our tear filled eyes. We trusted His whispers and leaned in to a story we no longer could understand or make sense of… we surrendered and re-surrendered each day. Our hearts were able to lean in to His whispers, because He was not afraid of our lamenting hearts and He cradling all our broken pieces within the anguish.
It is in the act of Lament, that our hearts are unlocked to God’s language of Hope.
He sang a song above our sorrow. He told our broken hearts that there would be a new light that would crash through the cracked places. A reason to fight forward, to bring light to the darkness and fight for HOPE.
It was clear. Gianna had a little sissy who needed hope too, and we had a new daughter waiting for us in China and we were to limp towards a miracle of New Life.
Fast forward (See parts 1-5) 11 months later and our whole family were miraculously on a plane to China, with a front row seat of a miracle of provision. God had used His body of believers to bring forth almost every penny needed to run to our baby girl. He took our whole family to China straight into the Broken Garden of her orphanage…the holy ground which held a new gift of Life.
We walked into her orphanage, our hearts racing with radical love and fear, tears already flowing with the emotions of grief and gratefulness all tangled together. We could immediately feel Jesus come close to us as He brought our Gianna with him to this holy ground to hug our bleeding hearts. We felt her love notes colliding into our souls with every step forward, assuring us that we were walking the path of light with her as our biggest cheerleader.
Everywhere we looked in this orphanage there were plants, flowers, trees… Life blooming in an orphanage that held so many broken hearts.
We saw random butterflies and they were like whispers from our Gianna squealing from heaven…
In the room where we would receive our new daughter there was a fridge in back that held a big tray of lemons. You will know how special this Love Letter was from heaven when you read all about Gianna’s lemon Joy. How her lemons are reminders to us that the most bitter and sour and slaying moment of our lives was her greatest miracle of goodness. She reminds us to taste and SEE that GOD IS GOOD…. to see glory through her eyes. In all our sorrow, to imagine what she sees, from the other side. To hold on and believe for a Future Glory….even in all the sour brokenness in this earth.
So there was this big pile of lemons staring us in the face as the nanny came around the corner carrying the most beautiful gift of goodness that took our breaths away. She was dressed in the color of lemon sunshine light and had flowers blooming from her black silky soft full hair. She looked like a wildflower. Our daughter looked at us with the most questionable eyes wondering why in the world 8 people were smiling so big at her and crying at the same time too!
Right then, I could see with my own eyes the Goodness of the Lord in the land of the Living. I could feel all the joy walking hand in hand with all the pain. There was no way to seperate the two emotions.
Our Eviemira had a blue butterfly clip in her hair…. a reminder of Gianna’s fingerprints on this gift of New Life. So many love notes from heaven that shined love on us….Yet, I could feel such loss woven into the tapestry of a story that was unfolding before our very eyes.
I could feel great loss as we were gaining such goodness. Neither the tragedy, nor the triumph were lost on us. There was this precious beautiful baby girl, carrying all her own brokenness….. being lifted from the arms of the only people she knew as her family for over three years…straight to a stranger’s arms that God was calling to be her forever family…to bring her a new hope. So much joy. So much pain. She was losing so much to gain so much.
There in that Moment I could feel all her loss and our loss colliding together into one ginormous ache and void. So much pain. Not a one of us able to fill each other’s void or fix each other’s broken. YET each of us a powerful reminder to the other that we have a mighty God who can bring beauty and light out of the most painful and darkest tragedies. Both of us a balm of HOPE to each other’s hurting hearts. We stood there in that place of our daughter’s broken story and honored the powerful collision of all the ache and all the HOPE.
In that Broken Garden of the only home she ever knew, and the only family she had ever known, all our broken hearts bled tightly together and we cried together and we rejoiced together as God crashed our hearts together.
But, those first Gotcha moments are not romantic….they are messy and heart wrenching and so traumatic. Within minutes our baby had to lose her whole world and gain a completely new world. And this time….We could understand this deep trauma in a way that we never could before. Our hearts also knew such depths of pain and loss. We could feel every moan, every wail. She cried so hard when we left the orphanage. Her sadness literally ripped our souls in half…we knew her pain intimately….we could all feel it in every fiber of our bodies. We just wept with her the whole ride back to the hotel and loved on her and tried everything imaginable to console her. To imagine that this must be similar to how our Father’s heart must break as He watches our hearts break….
To know that He cries with us.
….. There’s sometimes a pain so deep that there’s no distraction that can help and no fix to take away the sorrow. All you can do is sit in the agony together..to wait in the dark together for the light to crack through the black sky. All we could do was sit with her in her holy grief…and just grieve with her. We were not afraid of her pain…. We felt Jesus come close to all our bleeding hearts. As He was forging a wild Hope for all our hearts.
This was Holy ground.
But Our baby girl….She’s brave. So incredibly brave. God answered our prayers and she opened Her heart to us and has transitioned beautifully into our family….. and we are learning to dance a new dance of holding both the overwhelming joy and the overwhelming sorrow close to our hearts. We are embracing the gifts of new goodness within our great grief. Both the goodness and the sorrow are honored…. both so deeply connected. Both given space to dance.
Everyday there is a new gift that we are opening as Eviemira blooms and grows in our family and opens her heart to trust. She is funny and spunky and so soulful. She loves her littlest big sissy, Gia, so much and asks to watch videos of her every day and we play in her garden and catch all the “Gia-butterflies”. There is a precious and unprompted love she has for her heavenly big sissy that only God could create in her soul. I know Gia must visit her in her dreams to have playdates because she has an intimate love and intimacy and ache for her that is supernatural and nothing we could have every manipulated or created. It is a glorious miracle to watch unfold. This is a gift from God. New Life blooming in our broken garden….a new life that does not replace loss but that honors loss.
Gianna’s fingerprints are all over her little sissy and she is never far away from our hearts or our conversations. Gianna is kept close and always talked about… forever and ever. She is carried forever… The ten of us will reunite in heaven one day and ALL WILL BE MADE NEW! This is the truth that cradles our broken hearts. We hold all the joy, we hold all the ache. There is space for both to be honored.
But, one day…..Our broken Gardens will all be RESTORED! No more sorrow… no more wastelands.
ALL JOY ….COMPLETE OVERFLOWING JOY!!!
This is our wildflower Hope being unearthed from the depths of a wasteland.
GOD IS NOT DONE!
We will continue to update this blog with the miracles that continue to unfold through our Eviemira’s life. Eviemira is unique and special and bears the image of our beautiful God of light.
We want to share all this light!
For those who want to know more about her special need, we do not mind sharing all her specialness. She is truly incredible and amazes us every minute and dazzles us in every way possible. She has a diagnosis called Arthrogryposis (arth-ro-grip-OH-sis), which means she was born with joint contractures and some of her joints don’t move much and are stuck and some muscles around these joints are thin and weak.
Another name is AMC. (arthrogryposis multiplex congenita). “Arthrogryposis” means the joints are curved or crooked. “Multiplex” means it affects more than 1 joint. “Congenita” means the condition is present at birth.
Arthrogryposis does not get worse over time. treatment can lead to big improvements in how they can move and what they can do. There is no cure for arthrogryposis but
AMC is not a progressive disorder and will not hold our tenacious girl back in any way. She will need vigorous therapy, club feet casting and possible surgical intervention to improve her mobility In her limbs. However, though she has this condition, it does not stop her and it is ridiculously evident that Our JunJun is able in every way imaginable and even showing us her beautiful “new way” of accomplishing her desired tasks. Man this girl is determined! She has astounded us in every moment of being with her. We are so fiercely in love with her and can NOT believe we get to be hers FOREVER. Her AMC special need is not easy and this new journey is hard and makes us lean deeper into Christ’s strength in all our weaknesses… , however, it’s such an honor to be the ones who get to walk her through each milestone and loudly cheer her on!! And You better believe that we obnoxiously praise every single Miracle as they bloom in her life! And We have no doubt that our baby girl will walk and dance one day with her Beautiful ballerina feet someday soon. She is so incredibly smart and already blows us away with her Supergirl abilities. She is determined and brave like her big siblings. There is a supernatural warrior spirit in her sent straight from her Gia-Bia in heaven. What a humble undeserving honor to be her family.
Thank you Jesus for the treasure of this beautiful gift of New Goodness and Light. May we be as much love and LIGHT to her as she is to us. #giannasmiraclesgoonforever #EVIEMIRAcles
Every dry and barren place will burst forth with abundant blossoms
dancing and spinning with delight!
Lebanon’s lush splendor covers it,
the magnificent beauty of Carmel and Sharon.
My people will see the awesome glory of Yahweh,
the beautiful grandeur of our God.
Isaiah 35:2