I have always known that I wanted to have a daughter. Always. Maybe its because my mom and I are so extremely close. Maybe its because I'm just so stinkin' girly. Maybe its all part of God's plan to bring us to this point. Even before we had our two boys, I would occasionally mention that if we didn't have a little girl that we would need to hop on a plane to bring home an Asian princess. I wasn't joking! Then the Lord blessed us with two beautiful sons who we are privileged to parent. Lincoln was born in August 2006 and is almost 5 now. He is a love bug, precocious and enthusiastic about life. Then we had Sully in July 2009. Sully, almost 2 years old, is a charming, spunky little sponge. He soaks in every little details of what's going on around him. Nothing gets by that boy of ours. While the mere arrival of these boys changed the dynamics of our family, it was the little surprise that Sully brought with him in the form of a rare skin condition called a Giant Congenital Nevus (GCN), that changed our hearts and lives forever.
When Sully's arrival brought about a medical journey we never expected, it changed everything. I instantly became keenly aware that there are children all around the world, just like my own sweet boy, who are considered a disgrace to their family and who are abandoned out of love because they are unable to be cared for. Its not just children with GCN like Sully. My eyes were opened WIDE to the fact that if Sully, or even Lincoln for that matter, were born in any other place to any other family they might be left outside of a hospital or train station with no family to call their own. It broke my heart into a million pieces. It still does. We also were opened up to an amazing community of Nevus families, many of whom have adopted children with nevi from China. They are all a part of this story as well. When you combine a mother's longing for a daughter with a broken heart for orphans, you've got a powerful combination :)
I think this quote by Frederick Buechner sums things up pretty well...
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
or put a different way...
We know that God is calling us to adoption because our hearts are full to the brim with joy in adopting a daughter to call our own and there is no greater need for a child than to provide an orphan with a family. That doesn't even take into account the fact that the child we will adopt will have some sort of medical need, which is obviously a very real need to our child. We trust that God will equip us to meet our child's needs, no matter what they may be. After all, he's already chosen her for us just as we've already been chosen by Him. That's right. Carl and I are both adopted sons and daughters. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ as the one and only Savior, than you, too, are an adopted child of God. He adopted you into his family. He chose you. Cool, huh?
Fast forward through a million different blessings and the privilege of watching friends adopt from China's special needs program, to a day that will likely be etched in my heart forever -- Friday, March 18th. You can read about that day here and here. That was the day that I saw a little girl, just a tiny baby, on a website for a foster home in China who clearly had the same "blessing" of a GCN as Sully. I was instantly in love. Carl? Hmm...
Carl has been on board with adoption since the very beginning of my casual comments back in our early married years. He was not, however, on the "lets hop on a plane to China" today bandwagon. I knew that I had to trust his leadership in this process and couldn't force the issue. So I prayed and I asked Carl to pray about it too. I prayed for his heart to be soft and for my control freak tendencies to take a backseat. In the meantime, I prayed for Hope and worked to advocate her through our Nevus group. When the door to three very good leads to find her a family closed, I prayed like crazy that Carl would join me in my desire to move forward to adopt and tried to keep my mouth closed and my heart on Him.
On Friday, June 17th Carl and I went out to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary. We talked about our past and our future. Without a shadow of a doubt, we agreed that the next addition to our family would be through adoption and that we would step out in faith in a BIG way to begin the paperwork pregnancy to bring our daughter home. Unlike the majority of adoptions, we aren't in a mad dash to race through our paperwork. Yes, we want to get to our daughter as soon as possible but we are balancing the needs of our family as it is right now. One thing at a time. While that may mean that the adoption of Hope slips through our fingertips, we know that our "Hope" will find her way home just as God designed.
This is where it all begins!!
