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Jinnalee Barta

@jinnaleebarta

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↟ PNW living
♡ @adamjohnbarta
❀ @annikamarekbarta
MA in Leadership | Counseling + Care
† "Not my will, but Yours be done" Lk 22:42

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7 years ago today I had brain surgery. It’s been 2,555 days since. This was an interventional, life-saving surgery; I would have ceased to live without it.

A hormonally active tumor on my pituitary gland was attached to my optic nerve, carotid artery, spinal fluid chamber, and growing into my cavernous sinus. It hijacked my endocrine system, affecting almost every system of my body. I was losing my vision, having blinding migraines, and my thyroid and heart rate were dangerously high. Brain surgery was my only option.

The surgery was invasive and traumatic. The complications your doctors warn could happen… happened, growing in the years since. I incurred multiple nerve damages and a TBI. Endless complications continue to affect my entire body. I’ve had 15 more surgeries since, alongside countless procedures, emergencies, and near-death situations. Today, I still battle severe autonomic nervous system dysfunction, neuroendocrine issues, and chronic kidney disease.

The trials have been numerous; the sufferings felt never-ending. Loss of health is truly grievous. I know what it’s like to feel forsaken by God—identifying with Job when all was stripped away, Jonah swallowed up, Joseph stranded in a pit, or David crying from the depths. Yet in all of this, I chose to worship. Whatever I went through didn’t make Him any less worthy. It just required much more of me to do so. The cost was great.

Acknowledging the sorrow doesn’t mean I haven’t known His light in the dark, His presence in the pain, His nearness to my broken heart, His power in my weakness, or His peace in the chaos. I know that God was, and is, in my midst. He’s my healer and life sustainer. I’m still here breathing in the oxygen of another day.

My body, though broken, has awoken to 2,555 new mercies. 2,555 nights giving way to the dawn. 2,555 new horizons arriving with joy in the morning. 2,555 miraculous days of being alive. 2,555 days of feeling protected on all sides. 2,555 days of seeing a wasteland renewed, restored to flourish and bloom again. 2,555 days of seeing God’s goodness in the land of the living. 2,555 days of living and not dying, to declare the works of my God. by @jinnaleebarta

Summer is for sunsets, beach days, boat rides, flower fields, harvests, mah jong nights, chasing glimmers, and making memories ✨ by @jinnaleebarta

Adult adoption is very real.

The truth is that no one ever loses the need or desire for family. An aged out former foster youth and young adult never outgrows the need for family. A married couple without a child to call their own also never loses the desire for family. This is why God puts the lonely into families (Ps. 68:6) and weaves His story IN and FOR our lives.

On May 31st, 2019, in a courtroom in Adam’s hometown of Tacoma, we legally adopted Annika as a 26-year-old adult and she mutually chose us as her parents. Adam and I were 36 years old. Just 10 years between us.

We were issued a birth certificate changing Annika’s legal status as a ward of the state of Oregon to the daughter of both mine and Adam’s. It lists myself as her birth mother at the tender age of 10 years old with the address of my family’s coastal home that my grandparents built with their bare hands from the ground up. The home that housed multiple generations of my family became Annika’s birthplace on the new birth certificate. And the city Adam’s family loved and called home for generations was the place that the adoption was formalized and finalized.

At our adoption party we had a sign that said, “Our favorite book says we’re all adopted.” The B-I-B-L-E. Eph 1:5 states, “God decided in advance to adopt us into His own family through Jesus Christ... it gave Him great pleasure.” Those of us who believe are adopted as children of God. Adoption was first God’s idea, seen all throughout scripture: Moses was raised by Pharaoh’s daughter (Ex 2:10), Esther by her uncle Mordecai (Es 2:7), and Jesus by Joseph (Mt 1:28-25).

There’s even adult adoption in the story of Ruth. After the death of her husband, Ruth bound herself to Naomi with her well-known declaration of covenant: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God,” (Ru 1:16).

Our family is as right as rain. The adoption helped heal multitudes of pain for each of us. And just as it gives God pleasure to make us all His sons and daughters so are we living in the fullness and pleasure of being a family. We’re like a three-strand-chord that can’t and won’t be broken. by @jinnaleebarta

August comes with a weight. My father passed away and suffered his final weeks from neuroendocrine cancer this month after nearly three decades of suffering from multiple sclerosis. He died three days before my birthday.

The hours throughout August remind me of the mourning state I once was in and the grief that welled up within me like a flood with no dam to lessen the flow. Nights and nights of wailing and cries, trying to grasp the departure of a parent and the ache of never hearing his voice again calling me his “baby girl.” Nor would I see his face and that twinkle in his eye that appeared in moments of absolute orneriness, or in the moments something moved him to tears, or when his eyes filled with love when he’d tell you he loved you—leaving no shred of doubt that he meant it. Nor would I get to sit on his lap or hold his hand again. All the love unexpressed between us became a deep ache and pain within me that couldn’t be consoled for weeks. For months.

Now it returns in August and it creeps in from somewhere in the depths of me. It’s not as unbearable. The grief is more subtle indeed, but it still occupies my daily thoughts and it’s hard to utter how I miss him in spoken words. I feel it in the way the slightest breeze is felt wrapping around my skin. I know it when I’m gathering the last of summer’s harvest from the garden. I notice it even when the evening air offers a little chill or cool that’s been absent in the summer months before. I see it in the sunsets that begin to cast autumnal tones above and before me. I think about it every time I have the last of the seasons peaches with cream and sugar—a favorite treat in all its simplicity that my father couldn’t get enough of when summer bore its juiciest and sweetest fruit.

(Continued in comments…)

#grief #griefjourney #healingjourney #hope by @jinnaleebarta

I haven’t been on social media since MySpace! So don’t expect much, ha! I’ve been through A LOT (good + bad | highs + lows) that I want to highlight in these little squares. AND I have a lot to catch up on! ✌🏻

#pnw #healingjourney #firstpost by @jinnaleebarta