Lay Your Burdens Down and Come Back Home

“lay your burdens down and come back home”

Those are the lyrics of the song I’ve never heard before, playing from the Enter The Worship Circle Pandora station playing in our living room.

I’m typing on my computer, catching up on emails, and a 14 year old girl who I never met before this morning is sleeping on our couch. She was exhausted enough to fall asleep in the clamor of a three-child house, and now Frank has taken the kids to the Please Touch Museum so that she can continue to sleep in peace while this music washes over us.

“lay your burdens down and come back home”

But what if someone who lives in your “home” is a mother who you barely knew existed because you lived in a foster home from ages 3 until 10? What if it all falls apart, so you leave and wander from friend’s house to friend’s house for two days, and then “home” is a place that you are locked out of. What if “home” is a place where the depression that rules in your heart and mind keep you from being able to have a single day’s peace with your flesh and blood?

“lay your burdens down and come back home”

On this dreary, cloudy Wednesday for a couple of hours, we get to be “home” to 14 year old Alexis. Frank was walking up the street to do some roof work at Cast Your Cares for the day when he found her trying to get into her house. My awesome block captain husband who makes it a point to know everyone had already met her family when they moved in last year. When Alexis used Frank’s phone to try to call someone in her family, there was no answer, so without any other good solution we welcomed her into our home for the day.

After a couple hours of sleep to an Enter the Worship Circle soundtrack, some conversation and prayers, with plans to meet a friend and then head to a local youth shelter I watched Alexis head back out our door with a backpack I filled with some snacks and toiletries.

Later her mom stopped by to let us know that she had filed 302 papers to have Alexis committed, with no plans to allow her back in her home again before she turned 18. Her mom is done parenting her. After her mandatory stay in the program, she will probably go to a group home.

During a teeny tiny window of opportunity, we got to give a piece of “home” to Alexis. And maybe while she was sleeping those words sunk into her spirit, and she will have the desire and find the help to “lay her burdens down and come back home.”

When situations are this sticky and seemingly hopeless, I have to find hope in believing that this concept of “home” originates in a Person. All of the beauty and comfort and belonging and wholeness and rightness that comes from the feeling of being home is just a reflection of who our Father is and what His heart for us is like. When we long for “home” we are longing for Him. We are longing for what only He can give us in an eternal and permanent way. And He is longing to bring us Home, into eternal belongingness with Him.

So please pray for Alexis. If we ever see her again it may not be for years. But she does have our phone numbers, so it’s possible that we may still have an opportunity to connect with her wherever she lands. In any case, pray that Goodness and Mercy will follow her all the days of her life, and that she will dwell in the house of God forever.

While you’re praying, you can sing a big “hallelujah” for us and with us concerning Selah’s school plans.

We were ready and willing to send her to a neighborhood public charter school that maybe (?) would have provided her with an adequate education, but in a somewhat tough environment that would require tremendous trust and involvement from us as parents. One time when I google-maped the school, the neighborhood designation, “The Badlands,” nearly overlaped the dot that shows the school’s location. We knew of many Christian teachers there, so even as we became discouraged and concerned by the school’s very poor communication with us through the application process, we excused away the concerns that we were starting to feel.

I’ll explain more of the story in our upcoming newsletter, but after a series of “just so happened” events occurred (including blood clots and melting ice leaking into our new kitchen), we decided to put in an application at another public charter school in the city, Independence Charter School. It’s a really tremendous school, but shortly after putting in Selah’s application we found out that in previous years there have been as many as 1000 applications for about 40 kindergarten spots.

Imagine our shock and delight when we got an email the day after the lottery was held, and found out that Selah was #4 on the waiting list! When I wrote back with a question, my email was answered by the school staff member hours later on a Saturday night. Meanwhile, the lottery at the neighborhood school was held 10 days ago and we’ve heard not a word. Whatever our number is on the waiting list, they haven’t seen fit to let us know. Yet we did get word from Independence that Selah has already moved up one spot on the list. It’s very likely that in a few weeks we will get a call that she has a secured spot.

So we feel that God has been utterly faithful in caring for our sweet girl in providing an opportunity for her and for our family. Siblings receive preference for enrollment, so with Selah in, all our kids will have the privilege of being educated there. The biggest challenge and sacrifice will be the commute. It’s exactly 5 miles away, but in city traffic that could take anywhere from 25 minutes to an hour and 25 minutes in the worst traffic. With our van that is almost certainly ready to drop it’s transmission (again!) and with me often on-call for babies who are born at inconvenient times, we’ll be needing to figure out some transportation solutions.

So thank God with us for this beautiful resolution to all of our fears and prayers for Selah’s schooling. Pray for the transition that this will be to send our girl to school, and to get her there & home each day.

One of *my* solutions to some of our current and future needs would be to have regular paid opportunities to teach childbirth education. If I could get going and stay busy doing that it would help us to fill our income gap that our support isn’t meeting, and it wouldn’t require the same on-call commitment that doula work does. I had 5 births in 5 weeks this year, and none of us are ready to repeat that anytime soon. I’m happy to be corrected if God wants to supply our needs in another way, but please pray for our openness and God’s provision however He decides is best.

Thanks for sticking with this especially long update. I hope it both burdens and encourages your heart in a glorious way!

With love and great thanks,

Frank, Elizabeth, Selah, Callum & Clementine Varaso