Thank you.
Today I want to share with you some lessons
I've learned about love, when I followed my heart
and ended up living a life that was
totally different than the one that I had imagined.
Perhaps you've heard of 19 and Counting.
Well, I'm here to tell you our family
can count higher than that.
From the time I was a little girl kissing boo-boos
on my dollies, I wanted two things: I wanted to be a mom,
and I wanted to make a difference in the lives
of those around me.
By the age of 19, I was a registered nurse,
and two years later, I married a boy I met in church.
One year after that, I had my first baby, and it was heaven.
I was on my way to having the perfect little family
that I had dreamed of.
Nineteen months later, I gave birth to my second child,
a daughter that we named Elizabeth.
The morning after she was born, a doctor that I did not know
came into my room and, without waiting for my husband,
pronounced, "We have serious concerns about your daughter."
He rattled off at least a dozen things that were cause
for concern, and the real kicker was when he said,
"We do not know how long she will live--maybe a month,
maybe a year--but her life will be short."
And just like that, the pretty little life
I'd imagined for myself went out the window.
And as I lay sobbing alone, I felt great grief
for the first time in my life.
I managed to call my husband, and I choked out, "There's
something wrong with the baby."
Have you ever asked yourself, "Why me?
How could God do this to me?"
Well, those were the questions I was asking that day.
I felt completely unequipped to deal
with a child with special needs.
And I knew all the churchy answers.
But right then, they felt stupid and trite.
I hated it when people said to me, "Oh, God
must think you're special people to give you a special child."
I didn't want to be special.
I wanted to be normal.
I loved that baby fiercely, of course, but I was struggling.
You see, I was still grieving.
But to layer onto the grief, I felt guilt for grieving.
I thought if I only had enough faith,
that I could accept God's will without murmuring and in fact
not only accept it, but I should embrace it graciously.
Well, in reality, I was not embracing it
and I was definitely not gracious.
Then one week, that all changed.
Elizabeth was nine months old.
Aaron, our oldest, was two, and I was pregnant with our third
when we decided to attend a conference.
I don't remember how many classes I attended
or what else I learned, because one class became my lifeline.
It was a class on adversity that taught
me a great lesson about love, and it changed my life.
I learned that it is OK to grieve.
It's normal.
I learned that other people much stronger
than I had struggled with the load
that they were asked to bear and that even Christ Himself had
asked His Father to remove the cup from Him.
It was hard.
And it was OK that it was hard.
It was OK to grieve.
It was OK to want things to be different,
and it was also OK to move forward in faith and love,
trusting in the Lord, while still
working through the grief.
And with that permission to grieve without guilt,
the sun broke through the clouds and I've never
again felt guilty for grieving.
I have learned, through more experiences
than I would have liked, that grief and love are intimately
connected.
And as hard as it is to slog through grief,
it's also a reminder of how deeply I have loved.
Two years after Elizabeth was born,
my husband, Greg, was flipping through TV channels
and he landed on a Barbara Walters 20/20 special
about Romanian orphanages.
"Come here," he said.
"You've got to see this."
For the next hour, we watched as film crews went into orphanages
and showed some of the most shocking, inhumane conditions
imaginable.
I remember so clearly one cameraman--someone you never
hear--groaning out loud, "My gosh, these are human beings."
We saw children with disabilities
naked and tied to beds, treated worse than animals.
But we also saw families who had figured out
how to navigate the complex process
of international adoption.
As we sat there, I was on fire with the Holy Ghost.
I knew this was our path.
And I looked at my husband and I said, "I have to go."
And he said simply, "I know."
A few weeks later, I was sitting in a little apartment
in downtown Bucharest while Greg was home
with our three little kids.
I did not know how long I would be there.
I did not know how much it would cost,
and I didn't even know if we would
be successful in adopting.
But I knew what I had felt, and I knew that God knew it.
I was determined to act on an undeniable prompting
to get out of my chair and leave my comfortable home
and go and do the hardest, scariest thing I had ever
done in my life.
Eight and a half weeks later, I came home
with two little girls and a burning conviction
that we could make a difference.
That does not mean it was easy.
No, we had a barely potty-trained four-year-old,
a two-year-old, and three one-year-olds,
and three of the five had special needs.
I felt like I had been thrown in the deep end of the pool,
and it was sheer survival for the first year.
In fact, it was so overwhelming I actually have
very few memories of that year.
Maybe if you've ever been a mom of more than one toddler,
you've felt the same way too.
Eventually, though, I learned how to swim in that deep end.
And when my head was barely above water, I thought, "Well,
things are going pretty well.
So I bet we could do that again."
After that first burning-bush experience,
it took but the faintest whisper for us
to go and do another adoption, and then another
and another and another.
And today my husband and I are the proud parents
of 25 children.
They range in age from 4 to 31.
They're from eight different countries.
They have all sorts of backgrounds, abilities,
and disabilities.
And clearly I gave up on the idea
of being normal a long time ago.
Now, does that sound overwhelming?
It's OK; it does to me too.
I mean, who does stuff like this?
I get asked all the time if I had
planned to have such a large family,
and my answer is, "Heck, no.
Who plans this?"
At our peak, we had 20 children at home.
We had ages 1 to 17 with four in diapers and three
in wheelchairs.
And that was also the year our house caught on fire
and we were homeless for three months.
Yes, it is as stressful as you are imagining.
I have never regretted, though, acting on a prompting to love.
And I know that as you follow your heart,
your life might not end up as you planned.
In fact, it probably won't, but it will be amazing.
Because of the lessons of love and service
that we learned from our daughter Elizabeth,
all of the children that we've adopted
were labeled "hard to place" for one reason or another.
We adopted a daughter who is missing a leg.
One of our daughters from Romania had Down syndrome.
Several struggle with attachment disorder
and other mental health issues.
We have three sibling sets.
Several of our kids were older when they joined our family.
And one of our daughters was born
to a mom who could not shake her addiction
to meth even though it was killing the baby she carried
inside of her.
Rebecca was born five weeks early
with a heart twice its normal size
and in full-blown congestive heart failure.
In case you're not sure, that's not good.
The doctors gave her a 5 percent chance
of survival, which really is code
for "She's not going to make it, but we don't really
want to tell you that yet."
I sat by her bedside and wept while she
went through drug withdrawals.
And her heart struggled to pump blood
through her tiny four-pound body.
Seven weeks later, though, after many prayers, many blessings,
and many miracles, she came home.
Eighteen years later, and she's now a high school graduate;
she played varsity basketball; she works as a photographer.
And earlier this year, she came with me
to serve in an orphanage because in all the right ways,
she still has a big heart.
Some of the labels that our kids were stuck with,
though, were just silly.
Two of our kids were diagnosed with furunculosis.
I still have no idea what that is.
But one of our little girls, when I went to adopt her,
the orphanage worker shook her hand in my face and said,
"This is a bad baby.
Why do you want to adopt a bad baby?
There are lots of good babies here."
You know what made my 16-month-old daughter bad?
She was missing some fingers and toes.
That's it.
For that, she was labeled a bad baby
and considered hard to place.
I was never really too worried about her level of disability,
by the way.
She grew up.
She graduated from high school with excellent grades.
She now manages a retail store, and she's going to college.
And it's been my honor and pleasure
to be the mom of that bad baby.
So I have learned that love multiplies.
It never divides.
It's always possible to love another.
So love as much as you can.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Everybody can be great,
because everybody can serve."
You do not need a college degree to serve.
There is no age limit.
I've seen tiny toddlers to people
well in their 90s who have found ways to serve.
There are no special skills, there's no financial threshold
that you have to meet, and you do not need to wait for someday
when you have plenty of time and plenty of money to go
and serve--because believe me, that day never comes.
I also know that the needs that surround us are great.
Sometimes they're so great and so overwhelming,
we might not know where to start.
You might think, for example, that if you
can't start an orphanage or adopt 20 kids,
that you can't serve.
But it's not true.
We can all serve.
The world knows Mother Teresa, of course, and her great work,
but Mother Teresa knew the value of the one.
She said, "If you can't feed 100 people, feed just one."
Freda Billiter did just that in the 1920s in Indianapolis.
It was during the Great Depression,
and times were rough.
Jobs had evaporated.
Many families were facing really desperate circumstances.
But there were some families who had enough and to spare.
My great-grandmother Freda was one of those.
And she always fed the men who knocked on her door looking
for food after they did the odd jobs that she
kept for them, just for them, around her house.
Freda never went on to start a food pantry
or a nonprofit organization.
She never campaigned for public policy change.
And most of the men that she fed probably never
even knew her name.
She didn't even have to cross the street to serve,
but what she did mattered.
Feeding one person mattered.
It matters that we all serve.
I love to see the many ways that people are serving.
And there are as many ways to serve as there
are people in the world.
I have been blessed with an opportunity
to serve my community in my home,
but I've also been blessed to travel around
the world to work with orphans and refugees.
My friend Helen is a retired schoolteacher.
And in the last year, she's gone to Turkey and to Bangladesh
to work with refugees.
My friend Sarah is a busy mom with a young family who
felt compelled to do something for children in some pretty
desperate circumstances.
And so in 2016, she started Dolls of Hope.
And in a little over two years, she has seen over 13,000 dolls
and bears go to all four corners of the earth.
My daughter Katie saved her money
from her entry-level job for months
and then spent half of her annual income
to go serve in an African orphanage.
My son Joshua helped a little boy learn how to swim.
That might not sound like a very big thing, but you see,
Joshua was born with physical disabilities,
and we didn't think he would ever learn to swim.
When he did, it actually looked like he was drowning.
It was pretty scary.
But eventually, he figured out this way to swim kind of like
a mermaid--or in his case, a merman--and then he shared this
unique talent with another little boy with similar
disabilities who also thought he would never swim.
You see, it mattered to that little boy
that Joshua would take the time to teach him.
But it also mattered to Joshua that he had the opportunity
to serve.
I often think that one of my greatest teachers
about love and service was our daughter Elizabeth.
I sometimes wonder what it was like before we were born.
God must have had a plan for us and the family
that we needed to create, but He was
working with really young, inexperienced parents
with a lot of preconceived notions
about what family meant.
I wonder if Elizabeth volunteered to come
teach those young parents.
She must have known that her body would never
work in this life, that she would never
be able to roll over or to walk or to speak.
But she taught us lessons in love
and service her entire life.
She lived for 17 years in an imperfect body--far longer than
the initial predictions that the doctors had when she was born.
And now with the benefit of time, I can look backwards
and say Elizabeth came into our life
and caused a sea change in the direction of our family.
Without her, I don't think we ever would have adopted.
And now I can't imagine our life any other way.
I have learned and been taught over and over
and over that everyone can serve and that if you
ask God for help, He will provide a way.
Serve as much as you can.
I think I might know one of the questions
you might be asking yourselves right now.
At least I know the one I get asked the most often.
And that is, "How do you do it?
How do you raise such a large family?
How do you afford it?
How do you have time to do international humanitarian
work?
And how do you feed them all?"
Well, the feeding question is easy.
We octuple our recipes, OK?
But like most people, I don't actually have unlimited money
or unlimited time, and I cannot cross the ocean as often as I
would like.
Some days, some weeks, or months, even,
I can feel really overwhelmed.
I know I cannot do it alone.
And I know my husband and I can't do it with just the two
of us.
But I also know that through Christ, who strengthens me,
I can do all things.
I am not perfect, but I try to keep up
my end of the deal with God.
I go to church.
I read scriptures.
I pray a lot.
I spend time in meditation, I journal,
and I ask the Lord to help me and to strengthen me.
I ask for help in managing my schedule.
I ask God to help me know how to best parent each child.
And I ask for the ability to bear the load that
is sometimes so heavy and so difficult,
it makes me want to shrink and not partake.
Those prayers have been answered.
The Lord does strengthen me.
Sometimes the strength and insights
come slowly, drop by drop by drop.
Sometimes it's an immediate infusion.
Sometimes I can only see it in hindsight,
but the answers do come.
For years our family motto has been,
"Because I have been given much, I too must give."
And still I sometimes find myself telling the Lord,
"I am too tired, I'm too broke, I'm too busy to serve."
Sometimes it even feels like service is just one more
thing to add to an already overflowing to-do list.
But then I remind myself that I know
and I have lived the amazingly beautiful paradox
that the more I serve others and not just my immediate family,
the better able I am equipped to handle
the heavy demands at home.
Incredibly, with God's plan, it also
seems like I have more time.
Over and over again, I have seen that the more we
lift and share others' burdens, the more our own are lightened.
I have learned for myself through more experiences
than I can count that we are not here
on earth to find our way alone.
I know that the Lord will support you just as He has
supported me--sometimes directly,
often through the acts of others.
I know that when we ask God, "Who can I serve today?"
He will answer us.
The world's problems are many.
I do not know or understand them all,
but I do know one part of the answer to every question,
and that is love.
Love deeply, love broadly, love more.
And God will make up the difference.
Thank you.