Friday, November 4, 2016

We're Leaving for China on Wednesday

Wow
.
*Gulp*

Wow.

Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday!

We have been traveling/trudging/crawling down this path for so long. We used to have a card on the fridge saying "July 2010." My heart was bursting to adopt way before 'Stache and I even met the "length of marriage requirements." July 2010 was the earliest I figured we could start applying and meet the requirement by the time we were matched with a child, so having the card on the fridge was my little reminder. An encouragement that even though it seemed a long way off, that day was coming.

Well, God had different plans. He took us along a different road, to a life filled with two wonderful, rambunctious boys. But He planted that desire for adoption. He kept it alive through long years of waiting, piles of paperwork and fine print and now, in 5 days, we are getting on a plane and heading east. In 10 days, we'll meet our daughter for the first time.

Once upon a time, or rather on November 15th, 2015, after the boys went to bed, I was thinking about how discouraging the adoption process was. We had just been turned down for a referral the day before. We had been solidly turned down 3 times, and there had been several other referrals I had been hopeful about but they hadn't panned out. I told 'Stache that night, "If this is what the Hong Kong process is like, I don't know if I can do it." What other options did we have, though?

Then the thought struck: I had just turned 30. One of the China program's inflexible rules was that both parents must be at least 30. We hadn't met the requirements for the China program when we started the process, so I hadn't even considered it before now. But now I considered it, and on a whim, went and paged through the Waiting Child list for China.

Cute kids ... more cute kids ... Oh. It's you. 

Now I had been paging through these lists for months, trying to find the Hong Kongolese kids among the Chinese kids, and there had been lots of kids who caught my eye, tugged my heart, made me wonder how they'd fit in our life. But Mei-Mei wasn't like that at all. It was like I recognized her. My eyes were cruising along and then stumbled spectacularly because in a long list of maybes and definitely-nots and I-could-picture-hims and what-ifs, there she was. My daughter.

And on November 14th, 2016, I'm going to meet her.

Wow.









1 comment:

  1. a beautiful testimony of God's plan and faithfulness--and your perseverance! Can't wait to know Mei Mei!

    ReplyDelete