The Far-Sighted View

HEYYYY! Look who's back again! You just never know when this blog will pop back up. I kind of like it that way.

Since its been almost FIVE MONTHS since my last post and because I dropped a huge bombshell on our life and then never followed it up, I thought I'd go ahead and give a little bit more to the story. And since people have started asking me if we are "still adopting" since I never posted anything after my initial announcement, I thought it would be wise to update our friends and family.

YES! We are still adopting and the process is going well smoothly slow. Kinda kidding. All in all we are moving along. I promise to post more about our process soon. The moments that made me want to bang my head into a wall repeatedly are almost humorous now, so I'm considering blogging about those too.

For now, I wanted to give some of the deep background stuff on how God was bringing us to adoption. I like knowing the full story on anything, so I'm throwing it out there for you...

Sometimes its hard to know where a story begins. It seems that's true for many people's love stories. Maybe it's "we were friends for a couple of years before we started dating." Or "we knew of each other but didn't actually meet for awhile..." Most stories don't have a clear cut beginning. I feel that way about our adoption.

Did the story start in April when we downloaded our application? Well maybe before that in February when we attended that adoption conference. Or around Christmas when we decided to look into it rather than just talk about it. Or after our most recent miscarriage last April. Maybe that was the catalyst. Or really, maybe it was years ago when we first started out on our fertility journey. I keep backing up and backing up...

I guess the first time I actually thought about adoption for my own life was in June of 2004 when I went on a mission trip to Romania with the Student Ministry where I worked. It was the first time I ever set foot in an orphanage. I found myself face to face with tiny little lives who had nobody. Abandoned. Lost. Without Family. Our team held babies, rocked them, sang to them, played with them, prayed over them. We tried to squeeze out as much love as we could in a few hours each day. With the older kids we took them to the "park", worked on their English, hugged them, gave them little trinkets that were received like gold.

The whole time the overwhelming reality of their situations could not be shaken from my heart. Before this when I went on mission trips in high school or college, I always felt sad for people we were serving who were living in poverty or just had no hope. But in Romania as a 23-year-old, it was the first time I felt like an actual (teeny tiny) grownup in an I can actually choose to do something with this kind of way. In a spiritual way. I remember holding those babies and acknowledging that God had a plan for their lives. And I thought how cool it would be to be a part of that plan.

Scott and I had just started dating at the time of this trip. I mean Just. Started. Dating. Like we had gone on a few dates and then he went on a two-week trip out of country, got home, and the next day I left for Romania. When I got back I told him all about the sweet orphans I got to hold and love. And how for the first time I dreamed about taking one (or more) home to give them a new life. (Remember this post when I prematurely told him about my desire to have twins? Well, this was kind of like that. As I'm writing this out I'm kind of shocked he kept me around.)

But honestly, my teeny tiny grownup self still thought of this as a "maybe one day..." thing. I guess that was just the wheels beginning to turn in the adoption direction.

After we had been married for just over a year, I had the opportunity to go to Ukraine on another mission trip in June 2006, two years later. This trip also consisted of lots of orphanage work. It's crazy what a different place I was in while there than I was in Romania. The difference between a young, just out of college, single girl with a brand-new boyfriend, doing a one-year internship before going who knows where (teeny tiny grownup) contrasted with a married girl with a house, a dog, a full-time job, and starting to talk about kids (closer to a real grownup). And with that growth, God definitely took what He had laid on my heart in Romania and grew it tenfold in Ukraine. I'll write specifically on my experience in Ukraine soon as it deserves a blog post of its own. I didn't know it then, but I think God was intimately pricking my heart on that trip.

That same summer is when Scott and I decided we were ready for a baby. We didn't talk about adoption initially. We really wanted to experience pregnancy and watch God create life from Scott and me together. And I don't feel guilty for that. So we began our fertility journey. 

After our IVF procedure when we learned we had seven embryos, one of my first thoughts (among many) was, "Now we'll never adopt." I knew statistically not all seven would become babies in our arms, but even if half of them did, that would still give us 3-4 kids. And I guess in my mind, that kind of filled us up, which would be perfect. So I fixed my mind that God would build our family that way. And really, we were cool with that plan. Excited about that plan because we loved those little embryos. 

Without rehashing the whole story, I guess that brings me to where God began translating what He had been doing in my heart years earlier into light. So in my next post, I'll write about the logistics of how we got to adoption and how we landed where we've landed. And I promise it won't be in five more months.

But let me just end with this: I love the far-sighted view of stories. The fact that God was doing something in my heart almost seven and nine years ago while I was so unsuspecting (and not even ready yet) is so encouraging now. Things that happen today that may seem trivial or normal or you don't know what to do with or even just suck, God can be using them for transformation in days and even years to come. Even as you casually go about your day and build your life, He's doing something. And there's something about that truth that's flat-out thrilling.