Adoption Thoughts

Nothing new so far on the adoption front….just waiting on word from Bernice’s family this week to see if they have any leads to share, or potential children that would be a good fit for adoption. God has given me an awesome peace about just waiting and praying. I am hopeful that we will be able to work on the adoption during our upcoming trip to Ghana this December, so that has been at the center of my prayers….that we would have a child identified by then and that we would be able to work on the adoption in some way during our trip.

I was talking with a parent in Jake’s program the other day about our adoption and she gave me some awesome encouragement that I wanted to share. She had asked me if we had any adoption updates so we were just talking through the latest details. She and her husband have adopted 8 TIMES (!) so she is quite the veteran and she always has great insights for me. She was telling me to think about this period of waiting to find out who our child is as ‘pregnancy’. She said that for adoptions, this part of waiting, wondering, praying, hoping, and going through the hiccups/hardships/worries of the adoption process are all part of God’s way of emotionally allowing us to connect with our child – even though we don’t know who he is yet. Although the physical connection is not there as in pregnancy, through this waiting period is when the emotional connection is growing. For us, the past year of being in this adoption journey is step by step etching out a spot in our hearts for whoever our child may be. It’s all preparation she said, because once you have that photo of your child, and meet him for the first time, you are already in love with him and can picture him as your own….because you are already emotionally invested in him. This is similar to what happens in pregnancy….. as the months go by and your belly grows, your love for your child grows, and a mother already feels a connection with her child in her heart, even though she hasn’t met her child yet.

I remember back to when we first started in on the adoption, and I wondered how it all worked….this emotional part. I wondered how adoptive parents loved their adoptive children as much as their biological children. I knew that they did. I saw so many examples of it, but I just wondered how it would come to be? And now I have my answer. It’s all about how God prepares our hearts for what is to come. I felt how this worked with Solomon. And even the heart ache of that entire situation still had a purpose. It was a piece of God’s workmanship to continue to deepen my love for this adoptive child….whoever he may be.

A friend had this quote on her blog a few weeks ago and I saved it because I loved it so much:

"Waiting is one of God's most powerful tools of grace. God doesn't just give us grace for the wait. The wait itself is a gift of grace. You see, waiting is not only about what you will receive at the end of the wait. Waiting is about what you will become as you wait." -Paul David Tripp-