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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Restless



In early 2012 I started feeling restless; searching for something more. I believe that many times, when this happens, there is something that God wants us to search for, or open our hearts to. This could be something very small, but sometimes something a little bigger, like moving to a new home, or a new job. This time I just couldn't shake the feeling of restlessness. I was very happy with my two precious babies, and we knew we wanted to have more children, but I started to believe that God had something planned for us in the next few years, I just didn't quite know what.

So I started reading, because really I do love a good book where I get a chance to learn something new. Two of the books that really stood out to me where "Anything" by Jennie Allen and "Interrupted" by Jen Hatmaker. Both of them are about saying yes to God, and committing your life to working to bring glory to him.

A side story in both of those books also happened to include adoption. Everywhere I looked it seemed adoption was coming up over and over again. Maybe when you start thinking about something you just are more aware of it, but I started to believe that maybe it was God bringing these to show me something. My heart started to break for the orphans, babies that didn't have someone to cuddle them when they cried, and did not have the security of a full belly, warm bed, and most of all a parents love. It wasn't something that Jake and I had previously really talked about or planned to do, but nor were we opposed to it. And when your heart starts breaking, well you just have to find a way to do something about it!

I really started sharing all of this with Jake, and while he tried to understand and feel the same way, adoption was not something he had ever seriously considered, and he (understandibly) needed time to think about it. I guess when your wife comes to you sobbing because there are children without family, and we can be that family, it can come across a little strong :)

I used what little wisdom I could muster and left the poor guy alone for a few months. Well, kinda alone. I prayed continuously that if adoption was truly what we were called to do, then Jake had to be on board too. Two months later Jake told me that he just couldnt stop thinking about adoption and maybe this was something we needed to look into.

Two minutes later I had is signed up to meet with different agencies. That's how I roll.

After our initial meetings we left feeling pretty dejected. Adoption is expensive, wait lists are long, and we didn't meet the age requirements for some of the countries. We didn't really know where to go from here. So I went back to researching. And praying.

After much researching and praying we felt like we had a lot more clarity. Special needs adoption seemed like the road we wanted to go down, and since we had experience with Bud's surgery, we started to believe that maybe that surgery was preparing us for this. Cleft lips and palates are what came up most in our research, something I had previously known nothing about. At the same time we really felt called to Asia. So we made our decision. We wanted to adopt a baby from somewhere in Asia, with a cleft lip/palate.

Our agency said the China Waiting Children's List was the best fit for us, but we would need to wait until we were thirty. And so our decision was made. We would wait. And while we waited we had a third biological child. I figured this waiting would also give me a lot of time to learn all I could about clefts. I just didn't realize exactly HOW much I would learn.



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