I was reading in 1 Samuel about when David was trying to recover his kidnapped family (and those of his army) when he gave a fig cake to an Egyptian slave who was left to die in the dessert. I thought, “When was the last time I read about a fig cake? Abigail? Surely there was one before that, like Exodus…” So I investigated. Here are my notes.

Next month is August. A year ago, we were preparing to travel to Taiwan to pick up our two kids. A little later, all those plans came crumbling down, and we spend four months in depression, fear, and unknown. I captured how I felt at the time in an earlier blog post, and reading it today brought me to tears. As I have continued to study the Bible and allow it to change me, I kept coming back to the psalms: song written to capture the stories of people who feared, doubted, wept, and came out the other side praising Yahweh for his faithfulness. I set out to write my own psalm to capture that time, but I ended up stitching together 19 passages that express my heart more than my own fumbling words ever could.

return home day

In preparation for our return trip home, we slept horribly. Noah kept kicking me in the back and Jack couldn’t sleep, so we both ended up sleeping poorly on the couch in the living room.

packing day

The day before an international trip with six people will inevitably be filled with planning, packing, and stressing. We had already lived out of our suitcases for over a week, so it didn’t take much to get back to travel-ready. We did, however, need an outing of some kind.

visa day

In order to adopt across countries, we needed to get an immigration visa in their Taiwanese passports to bring them through the US border. The appointment at AIT (the American Institute in Taiwan) determined the timeline for the rest of the trip, and we woke up that morning with four kids for the first time.