Adoption Update!

Did you like my exclamation mark? Well, we have an exciting update to share! Yes, fasten your seat belts….again! About a week and a half ago we received another referral of a little boy available for adoption. His name is Samuel, he is 6 years old, and his mother is giving him in adoption because of financial difficulties. Here we are again friends. :) When I first read that his mother was still in the situation I thought no, no, no, not another one in which the mother is just going to change her mind in a week or so, and we will again be back at square one. (If you are just joining us, this will now be our 3rd referral for adoption….the past two tries the parents have changed their minds on giving their child in adoption after we accepted the referrals) So, you may remember that the most recent one in which this happened Jake and I had decided afterwards that we would no longer consider adopting a child with any sort of parents in the picture. Well, you know what? I think that was quite possibly the silliest thing that we ever came up with. All that was was an effort to try and grasp some sort of control in this adoption process. Ever since I stated that on the blog it just hadn’t been sitting right with me. I just kept thinking, who are we to decide that? God has been pressing into me that HE is the one making the decision for us.

Well, after we received Samuel’s referral we prayed about what to do. My emotions were in roller coaster mode….I needed to have some peace in accepting the referral of another child with a parent still in the picture, not to mention I was getting really tripped up by his age (he is about 2 years older than what I would consider my age cap is). Even a day or so after receiving his referral, I was honestly still thinking no, we will not accept this one, we will wait for the next one, and this mostly because of his older age. But something happened in my heart over the next few days. I can’t really explain it any other way than just feeling a peace to accept the referral and see where God would lead it. Jake and I both commented that weekend that God has filtered out the past two referrals, and if this boy is not the one for us than He will lead us out of it, as he has before. It’s an awesome feeling to just sit in the thought that God will lead us through the rest of this process with Samuel if it is meant to be. And if it is meant to be then I can trust that God has picked Samuel for us.

All that to say, I am getting pretty excited about this one. Things are starting to move fast with the processing of documents, etc., and we should be able to do some court dates during our trip coming up in late December. And of course, we’ll get to meet little Samuel then. It’s an answer to prayer, and I am so thankful. God is so faithful.

One interesting thing about Samuel’s referral is that it came to us from a new organization that our adoption agency has just started working with. His referral did not come from Pastor Sam/Pastor Gideon, and it did not come from Bernice’s family. The organization is called CompAfriciCare Foundation (http://www.compafricare.org/) and it is a contact that our case worker had made on her own trip to Ghana earlier this year. This contact totally came out of nowhere. We so weren’t expecting it, but our case worker had been in contact with this organization for the past 6 months since her trip, and they were trying to work out the details of how they would work together on adoptions. There is more to the story of this organization....and I can’t wait to tell you why Jake and I feel like God has led us to work with them for the adoption. I will post on that later this week.

Well, we know enough about the Ghana adoption process now that it wouldn’t surprise us if the status of this adoption all changed tomorrow. But, God has a plan for this little boy, whether that is for him to come and become part of our family, or not. He knows the beginning from the end. He already knows how this is all going to play out. And I will rest in that. More on Samuel tomorrow.