Our Next Big Adventure...Adoption!

It's official; we are adopting!  About three weeks ago, we turned in all our paperwork and are now in the pool of potential parents where the next phone call we'll get is that a birth mom wants to meet us and potentially place her child with our family.  We are moving forward with a private, open adoption through an independent facilitator here in San Diego.  It's not for everyone and took us a while to get to this pathway and I'm more than happy to go into the hows and whys and nitty-gritties that led us to this point, but that's for another day and time.

This new season is exciting and terrifying and frustrating and boring all at the same time.  And yet, here we are.  The hard work of waiting.  Again.  How fitting that it falls within this season of Lent--a time in the church calendar where Christians prepare for Easter through prayer, repentance and fasting.  Knowing we could be parents tomorrow (highly unlikely, but possible!) or a year from now is not exactly easy to plan for.  The emotional roller coaster of setting up a nursery, getting my out of office plan ready, buying ironic onesies only to wait for 3? 8? 18? months to get a call is not a ride I want to get on.  So we are taking it one day at a time, being forced into reflection and intention even more than we might in preparing for a child to which I gave birth.  I've got my extra oil ready for my lamp, though.

And while we eagerly anticipate the birth of our child at an unknown hour and time, we hold the tension of sorrow right alongside it.  Adoption is born out of grief, out of pain, out of brokenness.  It is not the easy choice for anyone involved.  It's a beautiful story of recreating wholeness, but we refuse to ignore the cracks from which each of us are healing.  That's the allure and depth of this life, though, right?  Are we truly living if we skate by on rainbows and "inside-outside-upside-downside-happy-all-the-time" and non-chipped dishes?  I think we miss out on our humanness that comes from a place of recognizing brokenness as well as joy.

Please pray for a good match for us and the birth mom.  Pray for the beginning of a relationship where we can share the goodness of our Father with our child and his/her birth mom.  Pray for grace and forgiveness and patience when it's been a while and we don't have any updates and are too defeated to tell you we don't have any new news.  We are so ready to take this next step in our journey of parenthood and are trying to learn what it means to trust Jesus in this new season.  Thank you for accompanying us in the unknown; we love you!