Excitement

'Come out to the street right away, please.'

This is a text coming from my dad, and my sister and I are already out on the street. We both know he just came from a meeting and the urgency we felt in his earlier texts suggests something huge just happened. We're both feeling a little antsy, and standing there on the sidewalk - we keep asking ourselves questions. "Did something bad happen?"  "Are the kids alright?" "Maybe he just needs us to go home and make dinner for the others so they can go on with their meeting?"

Whatever the answer is, I'm feeling anxious.

I begin to pace there in front of the church. I can see the red of the African sun beginning to spread across the sky - it's calm and perfect, but it doesn't affect me. My heart is racing.

I can see our white car coming around the corner. "There he is." Ashlan reaches for the handle of the front door before the car even stops - both of us know, deep down, that this has something to do with the four kids. I slide into the back with my ginormizgouslous, hundred pound backpack.

Questions explode like popcorn before my dad tells us we need to get home as soon as we can - the children are coming back.

It's hard to believe - at first I don't. Maybe they're just visiting us for the day.

No. Our family has been assigned place of safety for the two weeks it takes to investigate the entire situation. The court date is in two weeks, when the judge will decide what the best situation is for the children and where they will be placed.

My shoulders were still hunched up and, I'm sure, I had a stupid confused look on my face. I couldn't really register what was happening.

My dad explain a little deeper before I asked, "So ... does this mean ... for two whole weeks no one may take the kids from us? It would be illegal?"

"Yes." He said with a nodd and the tension dropped from the car. So it was certain. "Just continue to pray, because it's not permanent yet."

He and Ash kept talking - I swear, I can't remember anything they said after that.

I looked out the window at the twisted trees and graying sky swooshing by. 'No one could take them? They're really coming back.' I laughed, then started to cry.

For another 3 or 4 minutes, I cried.

It's still surreal to me. It's only been two weeks since we were packing bags and kissing tiny cheeks good bye. We expected the kind of good bye that lasts for months, even years, broken up by weekend visits every once in a great while.

But here they are - against the chaos, against twisted stories, against the devil, Love is Conquering one more time.

I'm so happy to have four sets of tiny, perfect feet running through our home again.

Maybe, just maybe, this is what God wants our home to look like. If this is the family he wants us to be, I think this will be much more than a two week stay.