"If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans" The Journey (Part 3)

And we waited...and waited...and waited. We were told, when we started the adoption process, that the wait time had reached 24 months--longer than it had ever been. Still, we expected to be home with our daughter by Thanksgiving of 2009. Each month we received an update from our agency on the progress made by the CCAA telling us how far we'd moved up in the line. By the end of 2009, they had matched children to families with LIDs (log-in dates) through the end of March 2006. (We're August 17, 2007) In 2009, they only finished 30 days.

In January of this year we received a call from Denise Schoborg, the China program director from Dillon. She told us that the wait time for a little girl, 42 months or younger, with only minor special needs (as our dossier requested) was about 8 to 15 years. Did you hear what I just said?!? EIGHT to FIFTEEN YEARS! Do you know how old we'll be in eight years?

We decided then to wait until after Parker's graduation, May 16th, to figure out what to do next. Our fingerprints with USCIS were about to expire again, and this time it would cost quite a lot of money to renew them. And, they would continue to expire every 15 months. (I'm not sure it's really our fingerprints that expire, but the clearance given by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office. They require that new background checks and prints be done.) We decided we were okay with them expiring, not because we were backing out or giving up, but what's a couple of months in the grand scheme of the years we'd been waiting and had left to wait?

So, we officially put the whole thing on the back burner until late May. Then, Darrell would take a week off and we would fast and pray. In the mean time, we would study up on fasting and praying.

When Darrell called me on the morning of March 11th and told me that Kimberly (Dillon social worker/friend) had called to ask us to consider a 5 year old girl, we were pretty casual about it. Later, Kimberly called me and as we talked, it finally registered that this was a BIG DEAL! This was THE phone call we had been waiting for! I told her about our plan to wait and fast and pray. She laughed. I told her that I didn't know what she found funny. She said it's funny how we can have great plans, but God has another plan. I heard or read a quote recently that says if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. That's a good one! (Darrell just looked it up and it is attributed to Woody Allen.)

You might think that there would be no "considering" involved, but that's how the referral was presented to us. Kimberly told us to take a few days to look over the information we were given, talk to a pediatrician, pray, and then let her know what we were feeling. I don't know if I can fully describe what it feels like to be "considering" whether or not to accept another person as your child. It was very unsettling.

To be continued...