Our adoption agency has told us not to expect a referral this year. We just hit 3 years since we started the process. The problem isn’t that there aren’t children. The problem is they haven’t been released to be adopted. I’ve had to kind of push it to the back of my mind so I don’t walk around in a state of sadness all of the time. One day it will happen. I still believe that. I have a daily devotional book by Max Lucado that a group of students that came here to Guatemala gave us. Last night I asked the Lord for a word that we are still supposed to be hanging on to this love we have for a child that we don’t know when we will ever see. I turned to the day that our paperwork was turned into Ethiopia: Feb. 25th. The devotional was about how the promises of God will be fulfilled and it explicitly said “orphans will be embraced.” It gave me what I needed for today to hang on, but I’m hanging on loosely so that I can live in the here and now.
When we started the adoption process I started reading lots and lots of blogs on adoption. I found out that not everybody agrees with international adoption, in fact, some people flat out despise it. It’s hard to read that stuff and not question your decisions. It’s really hard not to question it when it hasn’t turned out the way I thought. But God has been so faithful to speak through my confusion, my questions, my doubts and whisper: “This is my plan for YOU.” It’s okay that not everyone agrees. It’s good that people are seeking out answers and solutions for the orphan crisis…solutions that go past international adoption. These questions are needed because solutions are desperately needed. But it doesn’t mean that we aren’t where we are supposed to be…or doing what we are supposed to be doing. And it also doesn’t mean I need to feel threatened or become defensive. I am praying that the solutions that go beyond adoption will be things that I can become involved in. I want to help more than the one child we will adopt. I want to embrace more orphans than the one that will become my child.
I have wrestled with similar things when it comes to our work here in Guatemala. Although I’ve spent the last 20 years dreaming of living on the mission field, I did very little reading on people’s views of missions. I have read a lot since I’ve been here. My reading has been in the hopes of finding blogs and other writings that would encourage and inspire me when things are tough, but I seemed to have found more things that cause me to feel discouraged and confused rather than encouraged. Some people don’t believe in short term mission teams, or having Americans plant themselves long term on the mission field, or even going to a place that is not considered un-reached. I have spent many, many hours wrestling with hard questions. Doubting just as I did with our adoption. Feeling humiliated that something I thought people would consider noble is actually not so noble to some. It causes me to ache with insecurity and then ask myself some probing questions.
Who am I here for?
Who called me to those in poverty in Spanish speaking countries when I was 11 years old?
Who put on my heart to work with U.S. teenagers on the mission field when I was only in high school?
Who worked out so many tiny details to get us in the right place at the right time to arrive at the moment where we were asked to come work on staff with SI to work in a Spanish speaking country with people in poverty while simultaneously working with teenagers who come on short term trips?
Who called us to adoption?
Who are we adopting to please?
Who brought in the provisions to fund this adoption?
Who has encouraged us along the way when we wanted to give up?
Am I doing my life; making my decisions to receive admiration?
To be a hero?
To feel better than those who haven’t or haven’t yet?
If so then that would explain why I get my panties all in a wad when I read people write about how you should send 30K to Africa to help with family preservation instead of adopting. Or when I read that real missionary heroes go where no missionary has gone before…
or even when it stings when I read about homeschool moms that do science projects, build their own pioneer homes in the backyard, or whose kids know Latin by the time they are 10.
or when I read about women who never eat sugar, or eat only food that was available in the Garden of Eden, or think fast food will kill you faster than a Belcher’s Sea Snake (that’s the most poisonous snake in the world – I looked it up).
The fact is no matter what I do: adopt, move to the mission field, homeschool my kids, exercise 3 whole times a week and force down a salad twice a week, get every school subject done every day for a whole week (that has never happened), and hang up my husband’s clothes without complaining for the rest of my life…someone is still going to be doing better than me. Someone is still going to make my futile attempts look ridiculous or worse…wrong.
That’s why every day the last week I’ve had to ask the Lord to remind me of how HE got me where I am… with the adoption, on the mission field, with homeschooling, with being a wife and stay at home mom but also a helper to Blake in our work here. I have been teaching myself to make a habit out of reminding myself why I do what I do. And I’ve been telling my soul that it is possible to listen to/read other people’s ideas and opinions and hear them out and find the truth, while at the same time remaining steadfast in the assurance that I am exactly where God wants me to be.
If I can find and stay in that place where I am securely aware that Jesus got me here and Jesus will be present with me here until the end, I can stay in a place of calm. I can even grow and learn and accept correction or criticism personal or non-personal out a place of calm rather than a place of frantic. I want that. I want heart calm…all of the time….no matter what.
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