Our God is a Great Big God

I have to share how Chris and I have come to the point to begin our 3rd adoption. It is actually an incredible story--one in which we know that God is at work.

In November of 2007 a little boy with a congenital hairy nevus( mole) on 1/4 of his face was born and taken to an orphanage. Later his orphanage contacted Newday Foster home in Beijing to see if they would take him as a special needs child. We have friends that work at Newday. He and his wife and adopted Chinese daughter moved to Beijing to live and minister full-time. Newday mainly takes special needs orphans from orphanages that can't provide them proper surgery or medical care. Newday primarily sees that they get the surgeries that they need. Once they are healthy enough their paperwork is prepared to be sent to the CCAA (China Center of Adoption Affairs) to be entered into the system for adoption. Of course, all of these children pull at our hearts in an incredible way. I must admit that I am sort of a "stalker" to the Newday site to see what new children have arrived and just what the children are doing in their preschool, etc.
I was doing some regular checking of the site late 2007 /early 2008 (don't remember exactly) and saw a little boy who had been given the name of Adrian on Newday's site. He was a new child at Newday. For some reason, God really pulled at my heart when I saw him. My heart began to race and I got sick at my stomach. I was really wondering if this was the little boy that we were supposed to adopt. In China you cannot pre-identify a child (in other words--choose a child). Adoption must go through all the official channels that are required by the CCAA. I prayed right then that if this was the little boy for us, God would give Chris the same desire for this little boy that I had. I showed him to Chris. Of course, he thought he was cute but beginning another adoption at that time was just too soon.So I sort of dismissed it. I didn't say another word.

Early in the summer, I was at our adoption agency's picnic and began questioning our social worker about the special needs process and what the time frame would be. She said that a good estimate would be 2 years start to finish. Later in the summer months of 2008 , our friends came home for a visit. We got together with them on several occassions. Chris quickly began to tell them that I had fallen in love with Adrian. They went on to say what a precious little boy he was. We came home from that meeting and Chris said, "I wish our paperwork was ready." I promptly asked , "why". He said, "So we can adopt Adrian". I felt like God had just answered a huge prayer. I said, "What are you saying?" He said he thought we should start the process. However, we didn't really consider that Adrian would be an option because we wanted a younger child and he would be 2 or 3 before we could complete our paperwork. Our social worker had told us that if we were even thinking about adopting again we should go ahead and have our fingerprints done because it could take up to 6 months (she wasn't kidding). I rec'd the fingerprint information summer 2008 but it sat on my desk for 6 months.


Dec 30 Chris and I went on our second date of the year. The topic of discussion is always--do we adopt again, when do we start etc. As we discussed it that night, Chris and I both felt like we needed to begin the process. I told him that I could NOT get Adrian off my heart and I felt like if we were going to adopt a special needs little boy we needed to at least pursue Adrian. Chris felt the same way. I told Chris about a website that I just "happened" to find about a little girl who had the same nevus on her face and had just completed her removal process. We discussed that we needed to contact our friends and begin gathering information. An email went out to China that night. Our friends told us that Adrian's file had been sent back to his home orphanage so that they could prepare it and send it on to CCAA to be entered into the system. He cautioned us to not get too attached. He said that many of these situations end in a lot of heartache but he would do what he could . He sent us all of his identifying information--Chinese name, orphanage, birthdate and special need. He also forwarded it to our social worker and our China facilitator.

During January I was preparing for an adoption awareness Sunday that our church was going to have. Our pastor has a real heart and passion for this and had asked me to be in charge of getting something together. I had ordered a lot of materials for this special Sunday. One was a 30 day devotional guide on caring for the orphan. The day after I contacted our friends in Beijing, I read a devotional that talked of a pastor and his wife who had gone to a foreign country for mission work. There were some situations of captivity that had left a lot of orphaned children. They fell in love with one of the children and came back to the U.S. and began paperwork to adopt him. During that time they were constantly praying for this child. While they were waiting , his mother (whom was thought to be dead) was released from captivity and reunited with the child. The point of the devotion is that sometimes we want to rescue a child out of a situation or even out of their home country but that is not necessarily what is best for them. Our first and primary responsibility is to pray for them. God really spoke to me through that. Adrian needed us to pray for him and that was our first and foremost thing that we needed to do for him. We begin praying that God would place him in a loving Christian home where he could receive the surgery he needed. We had no idea what this little boy's purpose was in our process. Could it be to just help us get started? Were we supposed to adopt another child with a nevus? Or did God just want to increase our faith by praying ? Or did Adrian just need an intercessor?

We began our paperwork process . Our social worker told us that this would go quickly because our homestudy was basically written from previous adoptions , we just had to wait for our fingerprints to clear before it could be finalized for this adoption along with a few minor changes. It took 5 months for FBI to clear Chris' prints. We were thinking that maybe this was God's way of closing the door on our adoption of Adrian. Maybe our prints were delayed so that another family could adopt ADrian. We were and are at total peace because we believe our God is a Sovereign God who has control over all things. He hand selected this child for our family before the beginning of time. No goverment agency, not DHR or FBI or immigration , is going to change that. As much as they think they are in control, we know that they are not. We serve a much bigger God .

After our homestudy is completed , it goes to DHR for review and then onto immigration to get approval to bring a child back into the US. The process would mean about 1 month at DHR, about 3 months at immigration, then about 2 months to wrap up all paperwork for our dossier and then it would be sent to China. At that point our agency could begin looking for a match based on needs we were willing to take. Finally at the end of May /early June we got word that Chris' prints had cleared. WOOHOO!!! Things could finally begin moving again. We returned from a beach vacation and our social worker contacted us on June 22 to say that our homestudy was about to be complete and she'd contact me soon so I could see a draft before it left to go to DHR. On Friday June 26 I came home after a long week at VBS, family lunch with Chris , and MaiLin's allergy shot. I had a message from our social worker to call her. Naturally I thought she was calling about our homestudy. I returned her call but missed her. I went to lie down for a little rest and decided to check my email while I was resting. There was an email from oru social worker that our China facilitator was ready to match us with a child--WHAT???? I thought this was supposed to happen in about another 6 months. I was terrified, shocked, and not sure this was fitting MY plan. After I got over the shock, I called our social worker to talk through some things. She asked if we wanted to pursue trying to find Adrian's file and if I had heard from our friends in Beijing. I told her that I felt like we were supposed to pursue Adrian until God closed the door but Chris and I needed the weekend to pray through everything.

To help you understand, there is a shared online list of special needs children. Agencies that are approved by China to participate in this program can view this list and match their families based on the special needs/age/gender that families specify. Files are uploaded in batches to this online system by the CCAA about once a month. The reason that our facilitator was needing to know is because they were expecting the new batch to be uploaded this week.

Over the weekend Chris and I talked and prayed through what we should do. If Adrian's file was not on the list, should we wait, try to find his file, etc? Karla contacted our China facilitator to see if she could find out about his file. We weren't sure if we could even do that. On Monday morning Chris woke me up at 7:30 to say that our social worker had sent an email that our facilitator found his file. It is sitting at the CCAA to be uploaded to the online system soon. We aren't really sure what soon means but think that it will be uploaded in a recent upcoming batch. Our facilitator will be watching for it online and try to hold/lock the file for us. This will have to be a REAL GOD THING. I have prayed all weekend and even over the last 6 months that if Adrian is not the child for us that God would slam the door shut and there wouldn't be any questions.

Right now we are excited and at total peace knowing that God does not withhold his best from his children. If Adrian is not what is best for our family and if we are not best for Adrian then we will wait on God's best. It is just going to be exciting to sit back and see what our God is going to do.