Saturday, January 9, 2010

Lucky

I haven't shared one of my encounters with an overly curious person upon seeing me and Jack at the store in a while, so I thought I'd share my latest one with you.

I was at the grocery store and needed some meat from the meat counter, immediately the lady taking my order (who herself was Asian, although not Korean) noticed Jack, here's the conversation that followed.

Meat Counter Lady: Is that a boy or girl?
Me: a boy
MCL: He looks like Chinese or something.
Me: He's Korean.
MCL: Oh, are you Korean or something?
Me: No, we adopted him from Korea (of course this sentence was my mistake, I should have just said no and then the conversation would have probably ended, with a weird look.)
MCL: Wow! He's very lucky, very lucky.
Me: Well, really we feel like the lucky ones.
MCL: Was it hard to adopt.
Me: Not for us, I know it sometimes can be, but it was really quite simple for us.
MCL: But you spent a lot of money though, right?
Me: (cringe)...well it does cost money but you get a tax credit...(that sounded dumb)
MCL: (As a another meat counter lady approaches and she continues to hold my meat hostage) Hey look at that little boy, they adopted him from Korea, (to me) North or South Korea?
Me: South Korea (please give me my meat so my son doesn't have to be your side show any longer)
MCL: Well he's very very lucky, it's very bad there, very bad.
Me: (Ignore previous sentence, no point in letting her know she has confused North and South, and South Korea is actually a wonderful country that I wouldn't mind living in or raising children in). Well really we're the lucky ones.
MCL: (Ignoring me, walks up to Jack) Listen to me you are very lucky, very lucky.

Really the lady was not trying to be mean or rude, she just was a little rude. That's the problem, as someone who loves the Lord I find it very hard to be rude to people in order to get them to shut up, but I have to figure something out. Imagine the scene above if Jack was 12 or 13. In the middle of it all I actually thanked God that Jack was young enough to not entirely understand and completely not care about our conversation. Unfortunately the only way to shut, overly curious and sometimes rude, people down is to give a short, curt answer to their first questions. I need a go to quote, our training recommended that, and I've yet to come up with one that feels God honoring and protecting of Jack at the same time. You can pray that God will give me one.

But really I wish I could have got the meat counter lady to hear what I was saying because I truly mean it, really, we are the lucky ones. And maybe that's why no matter how much I doubt that what I say will make a difference or the chances that they'll ever consider adoption, part of me is always willing to talk about our adoptioin. To tell people what an amazing ride it was, to tell people that I would do it again in a heart beat, and again, and again.

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