We all have different responses when we encounter brokenness. Lifa’s was to turn to a quiet place inside of himself, clutching self-preservation as a stand-in for peace. Over the years, Lifa has begun to believe that he belongs. He has soaked in the truth that he is valuable, celebrated, and purposefully created.

We love long, quiet mornings in the Ladd house. We love them so much that we get up before 5am every morning to fill our coffee cups, read our Bibles and soak up morning sounds before the rest of the world wakes up. It makes the whole day different. 

There have been dangerous and difficult times since we said “yes” to God’s call in our lives, many of them better left unspoken. But we have also learned when it’s important to speak, and today is one of those days.

After my first year in South Africa, I visited my family in Texas. I took a walk… No, a stomp down the beach on Galveston Island, spiritually arrested with the choice God had laid before me. He gave me a “Yes or No only” invitation for a very special kind of life and family.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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?”

Your words shape your world, your values, who you are, how you love. Every relationship that truly reaches you develops it’s own lexicon that characterizes it, impacts your story, hems you into it, and sets it apart from all the others in the word. Moment by moment and laugh by laugh, we are creating our own household vocabulary because we want the legacy we leave as a family to be definable and worth talking about.