I'd Hate to Say I Told You So, But...

I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!!!!!

And, in case you don't know what I am talking about, here is a little reminder from a few weeks ago...

Jake

Louisville

Connecticut

Pittsburgh

UNC

National Champs: Pittsburgh

Janel

Kansas

Missouri

Pittsburgh

UNC

National Champs: UNC

JJ

Wake Forest

Connecticut

Villanova

Oklahoma

National Champs: Villanova

Nana Yaw

Louisville

Connecticut

Duke

Oklahoma

National Champs: Connecticut

Looks like I still know how to pick 'em!!!!!!!

Jake's Thought for the Week

Each Monday I will be posting Jake's Thought for the Week which he sends out to all the parents of the players in his All-Iowa Attack program.

Roll The Dice -Part 2:
(Reminder, last week was the initial call God gives all of us)
“Here is the irrefutable truth about games that my grandmother would try to teach me as she risked everything for Boardwalk while I tried to hang on to my little cache: When you start the game, you never know what the outcome will be. If you play the game, you may lose. But if you never play the game, you definitely will never win. And if you play the game, you have to roll the dice.”

Response (Excerpt from John Ortberg’s When the Game is Over it All Goes Back in the Box):

In these call narratives, in every case the person God interrupts gives his or her initial reaction directly to God. If you are at all familiar with the Bible, ask yourself whether you have heard the following responses from those to whom God has given hard assignments: What a great opportunity! Defy Pharaoh. Take on the Midianites. Spend a night in the lions’ den. Walk into the fiery furnace. Marry a pregnant girl who claims she’s still a virgin. Face jeers, flogging, chains, prison. Fabulous! What a great challenge – can we supersize it?

Almost always the response is fear. I mention this because sometimes people say things like, “God would never ask me to do something that I’m scared to do,” or “God would never ask me to do something that I can’t handle.” One of the most misquoted passages in the Bible is from Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth. Paul says, “God will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.” Paul’s point is that we can never worm out of responsibility for sin by saying it’s God’s fault. People twist that statement into saying that God will never give us more than we can handle. Really? Look around at the world: holocaust, death, martyrdom, cancer, war. Whether it’s a special assignment or just living in a fallen world, people all the time are given burdens they cannot handle.

When God calls people to do something, their initial response is almost always fear. If there is a challenge in front of you, a course of action that could cause you to grow and that would be helpful to people around you - but you find yourself scared about it, there’s a real good chance that God is in that challenge. Take it a step further. If you’re not facing any challenges too big for you, if it has been awhile since you have felt scared, there’s a real good chance that you’ve been sitting in the chair too long.

One day my friend Max was asked by his little granddaughter if he would like to see her run. He was surprised at this because, so far she had not been a great walker, though she was quite comfortable with falling. So, Max said of course he would like to see her run.

She lined up on one side of the room and sprinted across to the other side, directly into the refrigerator, and fell backward spread eagle onto the floor. Concerned, Max hurried over to her and said, “Honey, you’ve got to learn how to stop.” She looked up at him with a big grin and said, “But Grandpa, I’m learning how to run.”

God makes the call, we roll the dice.

Go Attack!
Jake Sullivan

April Madness

I am sure many of you are familiar with the term March Madness….well in the Sullivan household we celebrate April Madness which kicks off this weekend, and actually runs through the end of July! April Madness begins as all of Jake’s highschool teams return back to his program from their highschool seasons, and we start traveling to various tournaments throughout the country each weekend. Today we head to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the first tournament of the year….this year Jake has 19 teams going (3rd graders through 11th graders) to this particular tournament.

These weekend trips pile on the memories for our family and for all the players. In the excitement of this weekend a few of my most cherished memories from the years before came to mind. The image engraved in my mind from last year is this:

We were fortunate enough to get invited to an elite tournament in Florida last July, and we took all the boys to Daytona Beach. If I remember right, only one or 2 of these boys had ever been in the ocean before, and I remember as they all walked in they were holding hands and jumping over the waves. 3 hours later when we met back up with the boys to load up and head back to the hotel, they were still in this same spot on the ocean, swimming and jumping over the waves. They had sent one boy up to the Pizza Hut on the shore to order them a pizza, and other than that, they hadn’t left the ocean! :)

I will also remember this image from 1 ½ years ago:

When JJ was about 18 months old, he went through a phase in which he only wanted to be with Jake. So, when we traveled to these tournaments, he would see Jake coaching across the gym and scream and cry and throw fits because he couldn’t be with him. Some tournaments I couldn’t even sit at the games that Jake was coaching at because JJ would get so out of hand that I couldn’t get him to stop crying. It was SO EMBARRASSING! Thank goodness we are over that now! In fact, JJ gets to sit on the bench with Jake while he coaches now!

It was funny because the other day I was sitting at a game on the bleachers with some of the other parents who didn’t know I was Jake’s wife. JJ was sitting with Jake on the bench and I heard them say, ‘That kid is not normal! Look at how he just sits there! He is so well-behaved.’ I smiled and thought, oh if you only knew how it used to be!

Each of the Sullivan’s have their favorites about traveling each weekend:

Jake’s favorite is the high of getting to coach game after game after game and to ‘prove wrong the doubters’. :)

My favorite is getting a vacation from housework and cooking! I also love the bonding for our family and getting to spend LOTS of time together. It’s also fun to watch as new families in the program get to experience the tournaments for the first time. I can’t even imagine what the little 3rd grade boys are thinking as they step into a facility with 10 courts, a Nike store, a McDonald’s and Subway, and people from every walk of life coming together to play the game they love.

JJ has learned fairly quickly about what traveling to these tournaments means in his exciting 2 ½ year old life. All week long I’ve been hearing him say, “Wa-wee! (as he throws his left fist in the air) Garden! (as he throws his right fist in the air) HEY! (both fists pump in the air)” To translate he is saying he is excited to go swimming and go to the Olive Garden!

I wonder what Miss Jayla will hold as her favorite in the years to come?

Cheers to the beginning of the madness!

A Time for Everything

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, 11

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Adoption Update

I guess you could say we have some unexpected news. We received notice yesterday that Solomon’s family backed out of the adoption while they were being investigated by the officials of the Department of Social Welfare of Accra, Ghana. It was during this time that they were asked to confirm and finalize their decision of giving Solomon out for adoption and they decided not to continue on in the process. The assumption is that during the Social Welfare interview the family was provided w/information on how to keep their family together as one unit rather than separation via adoption, and they essentially changed their minds on the adoption route.

So, this was pretty hard to take. I am still processing my emotions….I guess right now I feel like I can explain it as grieving the loss of a child I have never met, but yet had internalized as being my own. And, even though this really hurts, I do not regret entering in to this emotionally and visualizing Solomon as our son. Had I not done this I think I would have cheated myself out of a beautiful experience. As you know, last fall God specifically formed a spot in our hearts for a 3rd child for our family, and for that child to come to us by way of adoption. This situation doesn’t change anything, and we will still be pursuing an adoption in Ghana. If anything, Solomon has deepened the feelings of us wanting to adopt, and I am thankful to have loved him in my heart, prayed for him, and let myself envision him as part of our family. With all that said, I also can’t help but be extremely relieved for Solomon’s parents that they will be able to keep him.

It’s going to be quite hard to invest emotionally into this experience all over again with our new child, whenever we find out who he is, and I think it will be tempting to put up my guard, ‘just in case’. But, the reality of any adoption is that nothing is said and done until the child is home with the new family. I think our situation was not very common in that both of Solomon’s parents were still living, and that he was still living with them. Perhaps we should have reminded ourselves more often of the possibility of something like this happening. I think my assumption was that they had already ‘officially’ finalized their decision to make him available for adoption, but for their sake, I am glad they were able to really work through their options to find how they would be able to keep their family together. I know we would have done the same had we been in their shoes.

So, now the spot in our hearts goes yet again without a face and without a name, but that spot of adopting our 3rd child is still there. It was there before we knew of Solomon, and is still there now. We know God has a plan. And, I think it is safe to say that Jake and I have now specified to our agency that we would like to pursue the adoption of an actual orphan, who’s parents are not living or have completely abandoned the child in an orphanage. We don’t want to exclude any child that is in need, but we also want to be realistic and not go through something like this again.

What a story we will have for our adoptive son some day….of all the other children it could have been, and yet wasn’t…..