"Fixed" the "Problem" and Katherine's Visit

First of all, I seem to have "fixed" my relationship with God.  I no longer feel waves of mysticism washing over me every time I pray or write a letter; we are keeping our distance from each other.  That being said, I have found THE name for God that helps me connect better than any other.  It works so well that I am not comfortable sharing it publicly (I haven't even shared it with Katherine or my mother, the two people to whom I tell most everything!), but I will say that it is a traditional Hebrew title, and it is strongly masculine.  That last part surprises me, because until I started using this name and discovered its power, I genuinely believed I thought of God as manifesting as feminine in my life.  I'm OK with God "being" masculine for a while (as in for however long this title holds its power), for I know God is really every gender at the same time.  Still, I find it surprising.

Second of all, in majorly all likelihood, Katherine is coming to visit this weekend! She couldn't come last weekend, as originally planned, because she had a headache that she thought would turn into a migraine if she rode on the train.  Therefore, we bumped her visit to this weekend instead.  She has been feeling better, so it should work out.

Due to problems with chronic pain (I am undergoing another Ketamine treatment March 7th-8th, and would very much covet your prayers), I still can't get to synagogue to see the friend I have made there and anybody else, so Katherine's visit will be a welcome chance to socialize.  We are going to make African Pineapple Peanut Stew (my favorite dish; she's never had it) tomorrow night, and Sunday we are going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, out to lunch (but not at the museum cafe because everything there is overpriced, and also because I am an observant Jew and there are very few options for me there), and then she is taking me for bubble tea, as per our celebrating-my-birthday tradition.  I have a camera, I will take pictures, and most likely the pictures will end up on this blog...I can't wait.

Now.  Here is a Reece's Rainbow aging-out girl.  I am privileged to introduce "KIERSTEN," aging out in APRIL.  Reece's Rainbow cautions that "her needs are quite unknown."  (Note she does not have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.)  This is her old picture because I couldn't get her new one to copy/paste, but please go to reecesrainbow.org and look her up to see a beautiful, more recent image!

Yelling for "Christopher"

In this post, I am committed to yelling for "CHRISTOPHER."  He is listed on Reece's Rainbow, and he will be very hard to find a home for, for four reasons:

1. He is a boy.
2. He ages out in the next EIGHTEEN MONTHS.
3. He has siblings (sister born 2005, brother born 2008), and he hopes they can all be adopted together.
4. There is no picture of him for people to see.

"Christopher's" diagnoses include: psoriasis vulgaris, Hyperkinetic disorders, and nonorganic enuresis.

Here is what Reece's Rainbow has to say about him (and yes, I am shamelessly quoting here):

"'Christopher' is calmer, verbal aggression in interaction is no longer observed.

"In a relationship he tries to act nice, waits for praises.  He likes making social contacts, has friends of the same age as he is.  The boy loves doing household chores.  Spends his spare time by the TV, likes cell phone games, sometimes plays with his little sister and brother.  The boy likes inventing things, he has logically practical thinking.  The boy has acquired knitting.  He is in a correction class at the school.  The boy does his homework in a prolonged school group, sometimes some tasks should be done at home though.  He is not so good at mathematics, especially in solving math word problems.  The boy packs his bag for school self-dependently, sometimes forgets something.  The boy does his homework quickly but superficially, then characteristic phrase for him is 'Everything will be fine!'.  The boy needs control.  He wants to be adopted together with his siblings."

I know there's no picture of "Christopher" to convince people to adopt him, which is actually precisely why I'm taking the time to devote a whole blog post to him.  And doesn't his description make him sound like a wonderful son? Who wouldn't want a teen who "waits for praises"; "likes making social contacts"; "loves doing household chores"; "has logically practical thinking"; and "wants to be adopted together with his siblings"? He sounds like the perfect boy for a family to me!

PLEASE SOMEONE "SEE" HIM, AND MAKE HIM YOUR SON!

Great Quotation!

I am having major problems sleeping (it's exactly 2:13 am my time), and am working on getting tired again.  To that end, I have been rereading one of my favorite Jewish books, Doing Jewish Theology by author Rabbi Neil Gillman, who taught my father in Rabbinical school.

In Gillman's book, I came across wonderful advice for living life.  Here it is: "All that God can offer Job is the reassurance that the world is incredibly complex, that God is in control, that there is order beyond the apparent anarchy, but that Job, as a mere human, cannot hope to understand it." (Gillman, 230) This quotation can be summed up nicely by another quotation, this one from a Steven Curtis Chapman song: "God is God and I am not."

Now.  This time I am supposed to share a girl.  I had chosen in this entry to share a child without a picture (some countries don't allow them) because it is even harder for them to find families than for others, but currently there are no girls listed without pictures.  Therefore, having scrolled through the whole page, I am sharing the girl closest to the bottom.  So please meet "KINLEY," aging out NEXT APRIL.  "Kinley" is diagnosed with Down syndrome.

Psalms

In this post I wish to talk about the Book of Psalms, or Tehillim in Hebrew.  Every day, following my morning prayers (or afternoon if I somehow missed the morning), I read one psalm, usually in English.  I think I'm on my third time through the book; this morning I read psalm #56 out of 150.  I use an edition of the Book of Psalms that was given to each classmate of a boy in my high school who died of leukemia, by his parents.  They even paid extra (I'm assuming) to customize them for us with our full Hebrew names.  It's not a translation I like, but the book obviously has tremendous sentimental value, so it's the one I use.

Until today, I could have told you three psalms that were my favorites: #19, #23, and #91.  Today I realized that on the level on which I like #19 and #23, I genuinely like every psalm in the book.  Each one is unique and special.

Far and away, however, #91 is still my favorite.  A quotation from it was the inspiration for the title of this blog: "He will instruct His angels to guard you in all your paths, to carry you in their hands lest you stumble on a stone."  I still find that to be one of the most beautiful lines in the entire Book of Psalms, and maybe even in the whole Hebrew Bible.

And now, a Reece's Rainbow aging-out boy.  Please meet "NATHANIEL," aging out in MAY, with delayed intellectual development:

What I Know About My Future

I know--at least as firmly as it is possible to know anything about one's future--that one day I will adopt and parent a little girl with special needs, more specifically Down syndrome.  I'll say it right out loud, right here, right now: adoption was never my "Plan A" for building a family.  "Plan A" involved four healthy, biological children, and I am still grieving that loss.

But.  But but but.

My "Plan B" could be God's "Plan A" all along, for we always say in our prayers that God is the God of the orphan.

My future "Plan B" family will look very different from how my future "Plan A" family would have looked.  If I actually go through with this plan, adopting a little girl with Down syndrome, it will probably be hard enough that she will be my only child.  If I have learned one thing through my own "special needs" (I don't like that term) or disabilities (that is the term I "like"), it is that children with special needs just need love and care like anybody else...and I can give that.

I know that this "Plan B" will be challenging.  Adopting anyone is hard, for the child and the parent, and special needs make the process harder.  But my "Plan B" is God's "Plan A"; it just took me a while to see it.  Adoption, here I come!

And just by coincidence, it is time to share a Reece's Rainbow girl...so naturally, to fit with this post, I am sharing one who is diagnosed with Down syndrome.  Please meet "CHANTELLE-ANN."  In terms of when she's aging out, all her information says is 2001, but again, if she's on that page, she has at most EIGHTEEN MONTHS.  As well as Down syndrome, she has crossed eyes.

Ordered my Stationery and Too Close to God

So first of all, I finally settled on some affordable stationery, and ordered it! I noticed last night that Amazon had about 400 pages of results for "stationery", so I looked through the first 15, bookmarking anything I liked under 15 dollars.  This gave me about seven results to choose from today.  The stationery I finally went with is a pinkish-purple color, with a looks-hand-painted (yes, obviously, I know it isn't) Easter lily printed in the upper left corner.  It is 8-1/2" by 11", a good size for writing to God (my letters can get long; I really need something full sized), and best of all, there's something like 80 or 100 sheets in the pack, which will last me, at the very least, 40 days

Which brings me to the second part of this blog entry.  I think I am starting to get too close to God, and I need to pull back; remember the link between revelations and bipolar episodes.  (The revelations, or mystical experiences as I prefer to call them, are entirely real in and of themselves, and not symptoms of bipolar disorder; what I'm saying is that they lead to bipolar episodes.)  This afternoon when I said afternoon prayers, which only take about five minutes, I had to stop three mystical experiences.  (I make them stop by doing something that hurts a lot, such as scrunching my toes; the pain distracts me.  My mother once suggested that this is why God gave me chronic pain.)  That's one mystical experience every two minutes of prayer! Too close.  I cannot decrease my number of required prayer times, because those are required of me as a Jew; however, I can and will decrease my number of daily letters to God from maximum three to maximum two.  If I still have "problems," (it's sad when getting close to God is a problem, but unfortunately for me right now it is), I will decrease again, to maximum one letter per day.

Now.  You guessed it: Time for you all to see a picture of another Reece's Rainbow aging-out child.  In this entry, I have to share a boy, and I have shared so many from "Jacob's" country recently that I would like to share someone from somewhere else.  So I meant to share the first boy listed after "Elize" from a different country, but I have passed this boy over too many times, and I feel called to share him.  Please meet "NELSON," aging out in OCTOBER, diagnosed with Hypotheriosis:

Four Items of Note and a Precious Realization

First, four special wardrobe items that I wore/am wearing today:

1. Homemade prayer shawl, made by me: Not the purple flowered tallit katan I made myself this past Hannukah, but rather the tallit gadol I made myself in high school; yes, it's lasted all these years and I still use it regularly! There are posts about it on this blog that I posted while it was a work in progress; for those who don't feel like digging them up (and I'm not sure there are photos with them anyway), it is strip-style (tallitot g'dolot come in strip-style and shawl-style; I prefer strip) and made of quilting fabric or calico or whatever you call that stuff.  The background is white with an off-white floral pattern; the atarah (neckband) is purple with a row of flowers (stitched on upside-down so the flowers surround me when I wear it during prayer); and it has a strip of creamy satiny ribbon sewn on as decoration close to each end.
2. Tallit katan with "t'chelet": This one is going to take some explaining.  T'chelet is the Hebrew word for a certain, special blue dye; we were originally supposed to tie a strand of it to all of our tzitziot (holy fringes).  However, it fell out of fashion during Roman rule for various reasons, and now, to this day, plain white tzitziot are OK too.  I put t'chelet in quotation marks because I found out after I got mine that mine are more than likely fake (I didn't pay enough for them, and they fade in the wash; supposedly, real t'chelet never fade).  Still, I can't afford to replace them right now (real t'chelet strings cost upwards of 80 dollars--just for the strings!), so I wear my fake set anyway.  At a quick glance, it's not as if anyone's noticing the difference.
3. Ugandan kippah: The only colorful item that I am wearing today is a jade-green sweater.  (Skirt is black with white fuzzy trim; leggings are gray with black rose pattern; socks are white.)  I don't have a green kippah--yet, I'm working on it.  My usual go-to kippah when I wear green is my white silk Yair Emanuel embroidered with gold and silver trees or branches or something.  It's white, so colorwise it goes with anything, and the branches theme goes well with green.  However, I plan on giving this kippah to a friend who is converting to Judaism soon (every male convert friend of mine gets a kippah from my collection upon completing the conversion process; the only female convert friend I ever had said she wouldn't wear a kippah, so I gave her a star of David pendant from my collection of those instead), and once I decide to give away a kippah, I start wearing it less to sort of get myself used to not having it.  (Remember that I hand picked my entire collection, so it's not as if it's easy to give one away.)  My Ugandan kippah is a rust-colored brown, which goes nicely with green, and given how special its "back story" (coming from Uganda) is, I don't wear it nearly often enough.
4. Gay pride button: I don't know why at all, I just needed to wear this today.  Maybe it's because I was rereading old blog entries yesterday, and a topic that cropped up a lot was my struggle to be queer (I used to identify as lesbian; now I'm bisexual) and Jewish.

And speaking of rereading old blog entries...yesterday I went all the way back to the beginning of this blog, May 2009, and going forward read an average of between three and six entries per month every single month that I've been blogging, and I realized something.  This may have been obvious to my regular readers, but it had somehow escaped my notice: I am a remarkably spiritual human being.  Even in my spiritual "down times," when I am "doing nothing," I take it for granted, just as a fact of life, that God "hears" my prayers; that I can feel God "hearing" my prayers; and that when it comes time to make the big decisions in life, I can "consult" God, God will have "answers," and we will make the big decisions together, whatever that means.  (And no, I don't think of any of this as literal; to cite one of my favorite authors, Rabbi Neil Gillman, we must talk about God somehow, but to think that anything we say is literal borders on idolatry.)

Now.  A Reece's Rainbow child.  In this entry, I am supposed to share a girl.  I have a real heart for the children in "Jacob's" country, first because I'm praying at least three times daily for a child from that country, and second because they age out younger there than in other countries.  So this is "ELIZE," aging out in NOVEMBER.  Her only special need is deafness!