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My husband and I have been in the adoption process for 18 months. This began with what we call ‘paper pushing’, which included, completing our homestudy, dossier, USCIS documentation, and so forth. We have had several distinct periods of waiting in this process.

We waited for our fingerprints to come back….
We waited for our homestudy to be finished….
We waited to hear word that our dossier was complete and on file in Ethiopia…..

We waited, with great anticipation, for our referral. The day that we received our referral was a day full of excitement that went something like this:

1. Receive long awaited phone call from our agency, Adoption Advocates International. Barely make it through the call without jumping up and down. Work incredibly hard to have a normal conversation while my heart was racing faster than it has raced before!

2. Hang up the phone and praise the Lord. Over and over, through smiles and tears. We finally know our son’s name. We have a picture. Thank you, Jesus!

3. Call my husband and continue jumping up and down and talking at a rapid pace.

4. Spend hours calling every single person we know and repeating the same good news over and over with equal excitement.

5. Surprise, my husband came home early from work so that we could go to Walgreen’s and have our referral picture printed off into 8×10’s that would go up all over our house!

6. Go out to eat where we took the picture of our son and placed it on the table for our waitress to see. Testified to the waitress about God’s faithfulness and the beauty of adoption!

7. Go home, stare at his picture together (with a flashlight in our dark bedroom), talk about his little past, present and hope for his future. Process the day together and drift of to sleep knowing that our son has made it through a tragedy that caused him to become an orphan~ and that soon he will be home with us.

Now, we wait again. We are waiting for his “three months” to be up at the end of July. When this time of waiting is over our case can go to court and we can travel to pick the little guy up. To help with the wait we created a construction paper countdown chain. Each morning we tear one more day away to mark that we are a day closer to being united with our son.

I sit now and often think of the waiting that we have gone through. I sit and think of what our son has gone through, what we know and what we will never know about his precious little life.

As many of you know, loving a child whose presence fills your heart but not yet your home is not an easy experience. There is great vulnerability in this experience. It is a time that I ask God to widen and deepen my capacity for love for our son so that my heart will be an over flowing river of love for him, always.

My husband and I, needing to feel a connection to him, were reminded of God’s unfailing love for our son. We have found this verse in the Bible and have chosen to make this the prayer we pray for our child.
I wanted to share this with those of you who are still waiting, in anticipation for your children to come home. Perhaps, this verse can be your prayer for them too.

” ….He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge…..He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone…”

Psalms 91

I pray this for my son today as we continue to wait for his homecoming. I pray this for your children today. I pray this for all of the orphans in the world today. May they all be covered with the feathers of His wing and find rest, shelter, refuge, and peace in their precious souls.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.