My Super Husband

I wish I had pictures to prove that I married a super- hero of sorts; there is practically nothing that he can't strap to the roof of our van! After flying home from HI all night Friday night, he was all too happy to accompany me to the last day of the big Ikea sale. Not only did we go to the sale, but we hauled along our five youngest children straight from church, a little tired and very hungry. (The big kids were invited, they just preferred to hang out at a friend's house.)


The first things I learned is that Ikea can be really, really crowded; the kind of crowded that means there's no parking in the garage and no tables in the food court. By the time we parked, found a table and got through the food line, it was 3:00. After eating, we navigated to the cube section where all my organizational dreams are possible. No sooner had we spent a few minutes there, the fire alarm lights started going off on the ceilings, there was a fire announcement and we were told to evacuate the building. What happened next totally baffled me - people kept shopping! I am not even kidding - we kept just looking at each other a bit shocked. There were many people heading for the exits, as we were, but we kept passing people that acted like nothing was going on! JD and I finally ditched the cart, made the kids hold their coats and were more aggressively passing the aisle-clogging shoppers to get to an exit.


It probably only took five minutes to get to the exit, but I was getting nervous and had a spiritual insight in those moments. All around us there are lost people...people that don't see eternity, people that can't see past the chairs and bookcases that this world has to offer. During that time of moving our family towards the exit, we forgot the cubes and baskets we came for - during that five minutes, they didn't matter to me anymore. What was so astonishing was that people were so involved in comparing and buying, that they didn't consider the possibility of perishing. How often is this actually true in life, even of Christians? As we live our day to day life, we have to remember that at any moment none of what this life has to offer will matter. In a matter of a moment, we will have to stand before the great Judge and he'll never ask what bookshelf we chose, He'll only ask if we helped guide others to Him while we were on this earth.


Long story short - the alarm was cancelled about the time we made it to the door; it was all because a child pulled the alarm button. (That announcement all made us look at Ben since we had a very similar experience last January.) Anyway, we did return for the cubes and baskets we made the trip for. And while we were already pushing the limits of the interior of our van, I suggested we check out the scratch and dent section... and there it was... the exact dresser that Alei has been wanting. It was the dresser that she jokingly asked me to buy as I headed at the door that morning, and it was $100 off due to a bent drawer part that JD fixed in about five minutes. JD looked at me, I looked at him, he told me that he could strap it to the roof. Sure enough, in the freezing, freezing cold, JD strapped that big dresser to the roof, along with some other much-easier-to-load cube boxes.


When we were done, neither JD nor I could feel our hands and Elijah was fast asleep in his car-seat before we even started the van. I just wish I had a picture; non-super-hero husbands would have said it couldn't be done!


My hero husband wants me to document and post about our current adoption dilemma, only so we will be able to show how God will move mightily on behalf of the orphans that He desperately loves and longs to bring into families.