A Part of The Process People Never Talk About....

About 1 week before Christmas, Jeremy and I received a phone call telling us that we had been matched with a sweet little boy. You would think that we both would have been ecstatic and excited, but that was not the case. Jeremy was completely at peace with this little boy being our son, but I was not. I did not have peace about the decision and did not feel like he was supposed to be our son or to be in our family.  We were on opposite pages at this point. Never in a million years did we think to pray for peace and harmony for when we received a referral. We had read all of these blogs about how people were so excited and overjoyed and honestly just assumed that is how it would be for us too. Jeremy kept telling me that it was a "family" decision and not just his decision and encouraged us to just take time and pray for peace. He was never pushy in trying to get me to think like him or make a decision, instead he was encouraging to me to just keep praying. We took a little over 2 weeks to pray, and let me tell you, we prayed more in that 2 weeks than we have prayed all together in our entire lives. I still did not have the peace we needed to move forward and to be honest, I was starting to get a little agitated with God because I was BEGGING for peace! I spent every morning on my hands and knees literally just begging "God, please give me the peace Jeremy has if this boy is meant to be our son! We will move forward if I can just have peace with the decision."

 

This honestly knocked us off our feet because all you ever hear in adoption are the happy stories of how people knew instantly that it was their child. I called our agency panicking because I didn't know for sure if he was ours and I was having to pray about it so hard. I felt like the most awful person ever and honestly, I questioned so many things about myself during those 2 weeks. The agency and our case worker re-assured me that this happens often in adoption, but nobody ever writes about it or talks about it because it can be shameful or embarrassing.

 

Needless to say, after 2 weeks of intense praying and never receiving the peace we needed to move forward, we let the agency know we were declining. Of course, I felt completely guilty and awful. I cried and cried because of the guilt.  We had dinner with some friends (and also a pastor) and shared what we were going through and they encouraged us to change our thinking from us declining the child to thinking that we were a step on this child's journey...that maybe, his forever family wasn't complete with their adoption paperwork and God used us as a stepping stone to get him to his forever family. They will probably never truly know how much they helped us that night. We started looking at it through that light and continued to pray for this sweet little boy.

 

The most amazing part of the story is that when our agency called us about Nathan (our son), they said, "we have to tell you what happened to the other little boy". Of course I was all ears listening and excited to hear what happened. We wondered about him daily and thought we would always question if we had made the right or wrong decision. She told me that 2 days after we declined, the agency became aware that he had a half brother living here and they were able to place him with his brother! They did not know this

information when they matched him with our family. Wow! Tears of joy ran down my face as I knew that God didn't give me a peace for a reason. If we had decided to go ahead and accept this little boy, he wouldn't have been placed with his brother. He will now be living a world away from his birth country in the United States in a home with his brother. How amazing is that?
 

Things we learned from this:

We learned that God's plans are so much bigger than our own and even when we do not understand it or do not feel good about it, we should always seek God's provision and not our own. He is so good! We did not feel good declining, but there was a bigger picture to the puzzle that hadn't been completed.

 

We learned how to pray better. We started praying for very specific things for our next match so that we would immediately know (like the mushroom story :) that he was our son. It taught us that God doesn't want to just answer our big prayers, he wants to know all details of what we want and desires to give us everything we can ever imagine! Pray specifics and don't be ashamed of it.

 

We learned how to work through a difficult time in our marriage. Being on opposite pages of the book when it comes to a child can be difficult to say the least. I learned how amazing Jeremy is though because he never pushed me (like I might have him :), he just encouraged me to pray, pray, and pray some more. He was so gentle with his words and always let me know that even though we were having different thoughts, we were still on the same team and it would be a unified decision. He definitely led us through that trial and I will always be forever grateful.

 

We truly believe that God gave us the closure we needed with this little boy so we could share this story. Hopefully we can help another family along their journey who is struggling with the same thing. People get referrals all the time that are not meant to be in their family for some reason or another.  Our agency is absolutely wonderful, but let's be honest, they are not God.  They do their best to match up children with families, but we have to do our part and pray for His plan for our family and the child.    Always remember that God's plans are so much bigger than our own and you are not alone!