Be careful what you read before bedtime

Last night I pulled out my friend, Lysa TerKeurst's book (okay, I've never met her face to face, but we've emailed once or twice, so I say that counts), What Happens When Women Say Yes to God. I had gotten a few pages into it, then stopped to tell Mr. at Home about Lysa's amazing adoption story. She and her husband adopted 2 teenage boys from Africa in a pure amazing God thing. I then put the book away and went to sleep.

And had one of those very realistic dreams. You know the ones. The kind that you wake up from and remember every detail and keep remembering throughout the day.

In this dream we were adopting a little girl from Africa. Instead of us traveling to get her, a whole group of children was being brought to the US together to meet their families. My mom and I went to a local community center to meet with the group and waited for the lady on stage to call our name. Our name was called, but instead of the little girl we expected, we were presented with a girl of about 9-years old with long strawberry blonde hair. Due to some sort of mix-up, all these kids were from Russia. The facilitators left us with the girl, whose name was Lauren, and I immediately knew that, despite what our other plans had been, this was supposed to be my daughter. We had all kinds of questions about her, but there was no one available to answer them (you can imagine the chaos in that room) and no one to translate between me and Lauren, so we were trying to use whatever signs we could. After all, I had been preparing for an African daughter and hadn't learned any Russian. The clothes we had ready were too small, K wasn't the oldest anymore, and I wasn't sure if I was ready for a 9-year-old, but it didn't matter because here she was and I wasn't giving her up.

And then I woke up. And I totally blame Lysa and her book for such a weird dream, even if the few pages I had read before bed didn't discuss her adoption at all :-)