We have asked you to pray with us about the slowdown of the adoption process in Ethiopia. Although our agency is once again issuing referrals (notifying parents they have been matched with a child or children), it was made clear to us yesterday that Ethiopia is only processing 5 new adoption cases per day. That's the abbreviated version of what is going on. It was also mentioned that should this rate of processing continue our adoption process could be delayed for years. That means that we could receive our referral within the next few months and have to watch our children grow up in pictures and hear of their well being through medical reports for 12 months or longer before we could ever hold them.
Why don't we change agencies, pick another country, adopt domestically, or just quit all together and have another biological child? There is not a doubt in our minds that God has called us to adopt and more specifically that He has called us to adopt from Ethiopia. The very minute He called us to adopt He made us the father and mother of two children in Ethiopia. They are already ours.
I started thinking more about this after reflecting on a conversation I had this past week during a lunch meeting. One of the men I was with asked me about my family and wanted to know if I had any children. Without even thinking my response was, "I have a daughter who is almost nine, a son who is twenty months old and thinks he runs the house, and I have two children somewhere in Ethiopia that I am waiting to bring home." He looked a little shocked at the last part of my comment, but who expects to hear someone say they have two children they can't get to right now?
My children in Ethiopia are just as much mine as Evey and Dash are. There is nothing I wouldn't do, save dishonoring my Lord, to get to them if we were separated. I would endure anything I had to in order to ensure they were safe in my care. I certainly would never give up pursuing them and I would wait as long as I had to in order to be with them. It is the same with our two in Ethiopia.
In discussing this with Sharon, we both agreed the easy thing would be to count our losses, leave the Ethiopia program, and either take another route to adopt or have another child of our own. The funny thing is, we could have had one child and be expecting our fourth in the time we have already invested in this process. We both know that would be a selfish and cowardly reaction to what we are going through. As Sharon said, "I don't want to stand in front of God and answer for leaving two children behind." I also had a friend remind me that things didn't go so well for the Hebrew people when they complained against God in the wilderness. We fear being outside the will of God much more than we fear being in a long drawn out wait to bring our children home.
I know that my Lord has been more than patient with me. He overcame sin, death, and the grave so that I could be His child and have all the blessings of being in His family. I don't have to go through as much to get to my children as He did to get to me. Even through my rebellion He never stopped pursuing me. Since we are His children, we are to be imitators of our God (Ephesians 5:1-2). Like our God we will pursue our children in Ethiopia and do whatever it takes until God places them in our arms or He completely closes the door to Ethiopia and sends us elsewhere. Please continue to pray that God will quickly bring them home.
