Referral Day!

How do I even begin to try to put it into words?

The culmination of four years of soul-wrenching waiting brought to fruition in one simple phone call answered in the carpool line on a sunny October afternoon. Four years to the day that our application was accepted to our adoption agency we saw her face Tuesday for the very first time. Surreal. Miraculous. Heaven breaking through!

One thousand four hundred & sixty days of praying with no answer suddenly a resounding “YES!” How do I take it all in? The reality that “baby girl” now has a name & a face too precious for words has yet to sink in. Daily we have asked that she would have enough to eat, that someone would be loving her until we can, that she would be healthy & strong, that the Lord would make her ours SOON. The answer to our many prayers is staring back through the enormous brown eyes of my fourth daughter on my computer screen; I am undone by the wonder of it all.

Like every mother with her newborn child, I can hardly take my eyes off of her…I’m memorizing the roundness of her cheeks, her perfect little lips & mischievous smile, staring into those nearly black eyes, . I’m one who firmly believes infants should always be held, and though this jewel is 15 months old, she’s new to me, and I can hardly bear to not have her near. I slept with my phone by my bed the past few nights, her picture just a click away. I don’t know when I’ll stop doing that.

I’m overwhelmed by the sadness of her story. The details will not be publicly shared until she chooses to share them someday, if at all. They are hers to tell, not mine. But the short version is that, like so many other children, she was found abandoned, no birth relatives to be found. I can hardly wait to pour the truth into her that there is a loving Father, who created her, called her good, and knew every step she would take before even one of them came to be (Psalm 139). He did not ordain her suffering, but he is redeeming it! I can’t wait to tell her that we chose her. She is deeply loved. She was worth the sacrifice.

It’s still a long road to get her home. We will hopefully travel in four to five months to meet her face to face and go to court where we will pledge to make her one of our own. A month or so later, we will get to bring her home once and for all. I can hardly wait! But for now, I am basking in the goodness of the God who calls, who equips, who is faithful to provide, who is the one who sets the lonely in families. There will likely be hard days ahead. Her suffering is real and we don’t yet know how her heart has been torn. In the four years we have waited, the Lord has stretched us, grown us, challenged us, broken us and built us up again. We have learned faith and trust in a way we never even knew we needed to learn. I believe he allowed those things, in part, so that we could be prepared to love her well and to shepherd her heart. 

“Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God’?

Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary and young men stumble and fall; but those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” Isaiah 40:27-31