Three sets of folded legs sat in a shaded circle in Cape Town. Three sets of hands plucked blades of grass and doodled with twigs in the dirt, mirroring our internal fidgeting that day. Our family gathered in Chris and Lifa’s favorite Frisbee field to talk to Lifa about what to expect before we took him to visit his biological father.

We don’t know many people in this city yet, and South Africa doesn’t know Thanksgiving. We are our pinching pennies (or rands), and the table is tiny in our current rental house. And all of my placemats and tablecloths are in a storage unit in Johannesburg until February.  This is not the proper recipe for a Hallmark Thanksgiving special. 

Cape Town: It’s enchanting; it’s amazing; it’s a bucket list city.  We didn’t move for the views, the adventure or the charm. We moved to Cape Town to live in Cape Town because we see something more beautiful here than sparkles and fairydust. Before we tackle the day’s life stuff, all three of us sit down with Life Himself, and we pray for this city. We know that Jesus has a big, abundant plan for this bucket list city.

We do our best during dinner table talk to keep Lifa’s father as the hero every dad deserves to be to his son. We do everything we can to stay in close contact, despite the distance, language and culture gaps. Dads are important.

Clark Kent's life has a lot of ordinary moments. So do we.Currently, our ordinary life moments include monkeys in the backyard. 

There are baby monkeys that wrestle and ricochet off each other. And mama monkeys that latch them onto their bellies to calm them down. The most notorious monkey in our backyard crew, however, is the slightly-too-brave one-armed monkey. (We all have our theories on what happened to that arm.) We love watching them fly from treetops to fence tops, stopping only to taunt the neighborhood dogs. Lifa makes up monkey family stories, and has given them their own voices and personalities. 

It may seem outlandish to compare the issues of humanity to a sunset walk on the beach with your husband. But maybe it’s not if we put things into perspective from the proper vantage point.

What if we don’t have to hold the whole world in our hands? What if we just use our hand to hold another?Or if we just give up a sunset for someone else to experience a love beyond what we could create on our own? What if we had fun with someone because they’re worth it?

When she was totally spent and totally out of words, Busi said, “Eish… That cornbread. I’m going to miss that cornbread.” 

“Me too, Busi. I’m going to miss eating cornbread with you. But I’m going to keep making beans and rice and cornbread for Sunday Lunch wherever I am, whoever I’m with. And I’m going to keep having church with that cornbread. You do it too."

This “Mom and Dad Date” is a ZINGAAAAA, y’all. We’re going to the other side of this nation, to a city very different from the one we now call home. We are going because God has asked us to come see, explore and pray there as we prepare for a church.

Last week, Lifa tucked himself away with a box of Legos and a vision. Throaty engine revs, constructive schemings, and the occasional worship song resounded from the other side of his bedroom door. Important stuff was happening in there. When I went in to check on him, Lifa roared, “I’M MAKING A MACHINE!” He looked on his creation with pride, oohed and ahhed a little, and then declared, “It is so cool, and it does stuff."

A miracle is something that happens in this world but doesn’t follow the rules of this world. We are bound with all kinds of rules like gravity, time, space, probability and logic. A miracle reminds us there’s something more and Some One bigger and better than that. We want to be a miracle family. No, scratch that… We are a miracle family.

A baby sits unattended, in the furthest corner of the yard, and cries. She’s had a fever for days, and her mother just cannot handle the sound anymore. She puts baby as far out of ear’s reach as her small plot would allow. There’s a free clinic less than a mile away...

Let me set the scene for you: 

We were baking inside of a broken car on the side of a road in notoriously un-safe South Africa. With no cars left in our family. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. I was existing on nothing but prayers and crazy. It was 1:00pm, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Lifa only had 1 of his 4 giant meals that day. We had no water. And did I mention the sweat? I don’t mean a forehead glisten… I mean armpit fountains and vertebrae rivers. A ROADSIDE SWEATBOX. Oh, and we had just said goodbye to our beloved Defender.

Nokthula beamed. A beautiful beaming smile from a mother living in two tiny rooms with her 4 kids and another teenage girl she just took in. A mother dealing with a family in conflict, an injured child, and burdened with mental health concerns for another child. She beamed. Nokthula tells me, “I can teach the Bible with anything. Look for anything you see, and I can teach you.”

Lifa is eight. He cannot possibly eat enough rice and beans, tuna fish or corn on the cob to keep up with the rate his legs are growing. He wears capes and plays with his puppy. He’s learning how to throw a frisbee with Chris and lives for Saturday mornings, when he’s allowed to sprawl out on the couch with a cup of tea and Tom and Jerry. He eats dinner INCREDIBLY slow because he loves having the family sit at the table, and, sometimes, he falls asleep between bites. He is thriving and so full of joy that we often catch him happy-dancing by himself when he thinks no one is looking. Lifa is perfectly eight.

“It’s a little bit embarrassing because my mom is white, and I’m normal.”

Ok. Good starting point. Control your face, Kacy. Focus on the road. “Lifa, what does normal mean?”

You can LOVE swimming, but never take a swim lesson or be taken to the water. You have to see the water, and then you have to dive in. You can’t be held responsible for what you’ve never seen and never known. But we are held responsible for what we don’t show, don’t do, and for our tiptoeing around other people’s values as to not cause a ripple or make a wave in life as we know it.

“This is our house. I think God just showed me that.” We just got married. We just moved into the perfect newlywed home – safe, secure, within our means, and just the right size to learn how to be a family. Our small home was perfect for our small family. But what about God's Family - the One we were made in the image of?