Jan 11, 2018
My friend, I'll call her "Veronica," goes for the spiritual jugular, so to speak. It's almost as if she avails herself to God and says, "All right, Lord, give me the toughest assignment you've got. Spare me no challenge."
As an example, when she and her husband decided to adopt a child, they opted for the most difficult arrangement currently available in our state: from foster care to adoption. It is a process fraught with uncertainty and agonizing tedium. The bureaucracy alone would put off most people of a lesser constitution. In all likelihood she and her husband will be caring for a child who has suffered a great deal of trauma and might have any number of spiritual, physical, and psychological needs beyond the ordinary, wounds that may take a long time, perhaps a lifetime, to mend. The process might take years, or worse, even after years of physical and emotional investment might not come to fruition at all.
All parenting involves a great deal of sacrifice and selflessness, a kind of patience and tenacity of spirit to suffer the pains of forming a unique, unrepeatable, little human, body and soul. But somehow the willingness to take on this method to becoming a parent ratchets up that sacrifice to new and inspiring levels in my mind.
But that's just who Veronica is. She's fearless when it comes to the hard realities. She worked in a poor part of the world where life was rather precarious for a woman on her own and she suffered the daily toils that come with such an existence – even the little things, like having to wash her hair in a sink of cold water – in order to help girls get an education. She spent years working on the front lines of the pro-life movement, tirelessly knocking on the doors of legislators trying to educate them about any number of complex issues. In a particular apostolate of which she is a member, she deliberately chooses the assignments that others will not take – the harder ones, the ones that don't even occur to others.