You know that feeling you get when you allow yourself to get excited about something? How it's all you can seem to think about no matter how hard you try to change your thoughts? Yeah, it's easy to get that way in Adoption-Land; but sometimes I wonder if it'd be better not to.
You see, there was this little girl that grabbed hold of our attention, of my attention. She was on our agency's Waiting Children list. She stared back at me with beautiful brown eyes. But she was older than what our home study said we would accept. Then last Friday happened and we changed our acceptance age up to 4 years old. She was 3. KC and I talked about her Friday night. And Saturday. And Sunday. And we prayed about her. Looked up everything we could regarding a few of her "conditions". They seemed to be big words for little problems. Sunday we prayed some more and decided that our next best step would be to at least find out more information about her.
Monday I emailed our International Coordinator (IC) and requested more information on her. She replied back quickly with a "I'm so glad you're interested in one of our Waiting Children!!". Waiting children are younger children with "special needs" or children over the age of 5 with or without "special needs". Our IC gave us some more information about her. We prayed more and discussed all our options. KC and I agreed that after getting even more information on her that we would continue to pray and we would only move ahead if we felt peace about it.
Let me interject here and say, we don't want to force something that shouldn't happen. We don't want to be so eager to have a daughter that we charge recklessly ahead. There is a little girl that is meant to be a part of our family - and we have to be patient and trust in that.
After getting more information early this morning (we're choosing to keep a lot of the details to ourselves), we did not feel peace about it. The main thing holding us back was not any of her special needs, but the fact that she was from another African country. God led us to Ethiopia and as of right now, we don't feel like He's changing that. Also, each country has its own set of rules, paperwork, fees, travel times, etc. and that country was a lot different than Ethiopia. As a result, we had to say no. And it. was. HARD. It would have been a lot harder had I poured over her picture day in and day out and convinced myself that this was it.
So what about her? What about this little girl? Well for starters I have a new person to add to my prayer list. After this all happened, I asked God to please give me something for her (and for me). I pulled up my morning devotional and for once, it had nothing to do with what we were going through. Ha-ha. I thought, oh poo. Then, as I got to the bottom there was a paragraph that caught my attention. It had a few verses in it. I saw Luke 12:7 and knew I needed to look it up.
I love when I read a verse and in my head He's speaking directly to me. He told me He never forgets a single orphan. And not to be afraid because she is more valuable to Him than the sparrows of the air.
So even though it didn't work out, she's being taken care of. Not by me, but by Him. He adores her. I like to think that she's someones already. I pray that a family comes in to adopt her. I pray that they've already begun the process. One positive in this is that she has one more person standing in the gap and praying on her behalf.
And us? We're doing alright. It's never easy when something doesn't work out like you think it should. But KC and I are confident that we are exactly where we are supposed to be. And Effie, she's exactly where she's supposed to be right now. Waiting. That's the common thread of our family no matter how far apart we are. We are just waiting. ©
-Sandia
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