Now that we had decided on an agency we needed to find another agency to do our home study because Wide Horizons For Children is located in another state. We decided on All God’s Children which has an office in Bellingham and their social workers travel all over Washington. I couldn’t believe all of the paperwork. We were told in the beginning that the home study would take about 1-3 months to complete depending on how fast we got all of our paperwork done. It was the middle of November that we started and I had planned on us being completely finished by the end of January. It is now 5 months later and we are still not finished. Needless to say that the Lord has other plans for us. Things are always done in His time and not ours. He is the great orchestrator in all of this and I know that everything has to happen just at the right time in order for us to receive the child that we are meant to have. I have to keep telling myself to have faith and remember things are out of our hands and will happen when they are meant to happen.
Since we began, it has felt that everything and everyone is working against us. Almost everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, but we have also seen some miracles along the way to let us know that we are doing the right thing. The first miracle was getting the money we needed to begin our home study. We had $0 in our bank account and had to come up with $600. Somehow we managed to do it. I’m still not quite sure how we managed it. We sold some things on craigslist that we knew we could part with and we gathered all the change around the house that we had and all of the money from my giant piggy bank. We ended up with just the amount we needed all within a week. That’s when we knew that we were on the right track.
Another blessing we received was how the Lord let us know that the group of siblings was not for us. We were pretty set on adopting them for quite some time. We had prayed and fasted about them in particular, but had not received an answer. Because they were older children it was going to be very hard for us to convince both agencies to let us adopt them, especially since we had younger children in our home. I knew that if we were going to go this route that I would need a pretty sure answer that these were our children.
After meeting with our social worker and hearing her side of things on what problems these kids could have and what could potentially happen to our children, I went home and sent a message to the online Philippine adoption group I am part of to ask their advice. All of the responses I got back were pretty much along the same lines as what our social worker told us. I felt sick to my stomach about it for two days and continued to pray about it. I then realized that I hadn’t received an answer that these were our children because I was waiting for the Lord to tell be that they were when all along He was trying to tell me that they were not meant for us. I then felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I knew I had received my answer and felt peace again. It was kind of heartbreaking because we had been so sure that these were our kids, but I was very thankful that the Lord was on our side making sure that we received the right answer even though it was not what we wanted at the time. We are now requesting 1 or 2 children under the age of 3 and feel very good about that decision. It will be a long wait and we have no idea what is in store for us, but we trust that the Lord does and will be with us every step of the way.
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