I am about to write words that I never thought that I would write in this adoption journey. It still seems surreal and yet God has guided and led and we have ended up in this place. So, here goes:
We are no longer adopting from Ethiopia. Wow, to type that out feels so strange! I could be sad, but I am not, because this was a God thing. In fact, I have some exciting news...
We have transferred to CHINA! We are adopting from CHINA! Our son will be from CHINA! Now, that feels even crazier to say!
I know I may have totally lost you and you may have a ton of questions going through your mind, so let me fill you in on how we got here.
If you have been keeping up with our story, you know that the Ethiopia program hit a new normal of VERY SLOW last year! We found out that the time frame that we were given when we started this adoption process had significantly increased (and I am talking years). We were upset, frustrated and confused. We knew that we were ready to welcome a child into our home way sooner than that time frame was offering us. We were told that if we wanted to transfer to another program within our agency, that most of our agency fees would transfer over.
That is when I started to panic and started researching every other option out there: other countries, domestic adoption, foster care, etc. We had never felt like we were called specifically to Ethiopia. We did feel like when we started we were called to a foreign country (my Haiti trip had much to do with this) and we happened to qualify for Ethiopia, so we went there. Our heart has always just been to give an orphan a loving family and home. The place was not specific to us. I was spinning my wheels trying to figure out what to do and I hit an emotional break down on our way to Texas for Thanksgiving (my poor sweet social worker, got to hear me sob like a baby about how frustrated I was). She encouraged us to take a season of prayer over all of it.
Here's the truth, I didn't want to take a season of prayer. I wanted to move forward. We had been waiting in Ethiopia for a year and in this process for 2 years. We had prayed long enough! Now I needed to see some movement, some action, some progress. Yea, I won't be winning a gold medal for best attitude here. It was not a shining moment for me. At the same time, Evan had decided he felt led to teach a sermon series at our church. I asked him what he felt God was leading him to teach and he said "prayer." BAM...smack in the face!"OK God, I hear ya." So, I decided to stop researching and trying to fix this problem and Evan and I dedicated the rest of the year to being on our knees in prayer together over this adoption, over our son, over which direction God would want us to move, if he wanted us to move. I told myself that I would stop searching and if God wanted us to change directions, HE would reveal that to us. As soon as I came to this decision, I felt this insane peace that I had not felt in quite some time. All of my anxiety about what we were going to do had vanished. I KNEW this was HIS story and HE would make things clear to us when HE was ready.
On December 11th, we received an e-mail from our agency inviting us to a webinar for families in the Ethiopia program to be informed on what transferring to the China program would look like. I almost ignored it because we had already looked at the China program and we knew that based on some of the qualifications, we did not qualify. However, we signed up and figured it couldn't hurt to be better informed. Five days later we were logged into the webinar and hearing about the China program. We were reminded of what the new Ethiopia expectations should be, which just kind of reiterated God closing the door for us in Ethiopia. We also found out that some families may receive a waiver to be able to enter China's special focus program, which includes children 3 and over with more moderate to severe special needs.
After some prayer, we decided to send in an application to see if we would qualify. Beforehand I prayed, "God you seem to be opening doors here, you brought this opportunity to us. If this is the direction you want us to take, please move mountains and let us qualify for this waiver. If this is not the path you have for our family, please close the door here by not allowing us to receive a waiver."
Well, as I am sure you figured out, we were granted the waiver and accepted into the China Special Focus Program. I almost could not believe it. We were transferring out of Ethiopia and into China. I could not have written this story this way. I thought my son would be from Ethiopia, but God had other plans. Both Evan and I had a peace about the move.
So here we are, a CHINA FAMILY now! It has been so crazy to see how our journey is unfolding. We are so excited to see how and when God leads us to our son. While there was so much time spent in Ethiopia, we do not feel like that time was wasted. God worked on our hearts in amazing ways during that wait. He pressed on us to be open to things that we would have never been open to when we started this journey. He prepares us, even when we are unaware of what He is doing.
Nothing is wasted, He works all things for good! His promise remains, forever He reigns!
We know that there will still be many questions that were not answered in this blog post and we want to answer those. So, if you have any, please send them to us via our FB page or email. We will be following up this post with a question and answer post to give you all a better idea of what all of this entails. So stay tuned in the next couple of weeks if you are wanting more clarity.
Thank you to everyone who has already shown us so much love and encouragement as we took this leap of faith!
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