The Long Awaited Story

We could never have planned for or physically done all that God has done to bring this child into our lives, and believe me, we were trying! Blogging, Facebooking, and spreading the word to all our friends and family. This was the recommendation to us by our adoption agency in order to help get us matched with a baby hopefully sooner than if we just waited for things to happen through the agency. A lot of times finding a match on your own works, so we were doing as much as we could to increase our chances. But as we have learned in the nearly four years we’ve spent trying to have a child one way or another, our plan and our way never works (you’d think we’d have realized that by now)..

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Last year another large adoption agency in Minnesota that had been around for over 100 years closed it’s domestic infant adoption program which gave our agency a big influx of waiting families (these two agencies have recently merged their adoption programs). When our home study was approved in January we were number 32 on the waiting list. This wasn’t the wait list to adopt. This was the waiting list to get into the profile book of 60 families which is shown to birthparents! Our only hope of finding a match was to do our own networking because we weren’t going to even be in the profile book for months!

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The first of every month we would get a report of how many adoptions happened the month before and I would calculate out how far down the wait list we might be.  I had a spreadsheet with comparisons of last years numbers going trying to calculate when we might get into the profile book. Occasionally I would check with our social worker to confirm what number we were. On May 2nd we were number 18 on the wait list. By my calculations we would be in the book around September…August if we were lucky. This was good timing because I am set to finish my grad school classes in August and my internship by the end of September. I was hoping and praying that we’d have a baby by Christmas time. This was okay because I’d be all done with grad school and work full time this fall to save up some money (you know, keeping myself busy instead of worrying and waiting for a baby).

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In mid May we got an unexpected email from our adoption agency telling us about a baby boy and asking us if we would like to submit our profile (which we hadn’t yet made because we had a few more months to do that!) for a potential match. We were so surprised and excited, we spent that weekend running around getting forms notarized and trying to perfect our profile. We were excited, but tried not to get our hopes up. We didn’t understand why we were even being contacted about this baby. We weren’t in the book! This should not have even happened.

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Two weeks later we were told that our chance at this baby was over. We were disappointed and really sad for a day. Actually, I was angry. Why had we even been contacted if it wasn’t going to work out?? But we knew it was a long shot and that we weren’t even supposed to be contacted about this baby, so we moved on. Back to our own networking, starting up Facebook ads to help us spread the word even farther. Trying to do everything in our power to find a match.

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Five days later everything changed. For reasons that we will never know, we suddenly had a chance again. We were asked if we wanted to meet with this baby’s birthparents. Of course we said yes! But we were also scared to death and after the roller coaster of the past few weeks, we were trying our best to keep a balance of hope and reality that this might not work out.

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Two days later we took the most nerve wracking drive of our lives, not having any idea what to expect, filled with lots of fear, and just a little hope.

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Within a few minutes of first meeting the parents of this little boy, our fears were relieved and we left an amazing meeting still not knowing what would happen, but wanting the best for this baby boy and his parents. Our hearts hurt, wanting desperately to be parents, but also because we saw the pain this baby’s parents were feeling. We wanted to be chosen to be his parents, but we also wanted the best for all of them-whatever that was.

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The next morning our social worker called and asked us how we felt. We told her how much our fears were relieved and that our hearts broke for them-that we would love for this to be our child, but we also wanted the best for all of them, no matter what that was. She then told us that they wanted to be matched with us!

Waiting lists…don’t matter when God is in control!

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Baby’s due date….the day after my last class of grad school!

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Ephesians 3:20

God can do anything, you know-far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!

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