On your mark...

When our daughter was about 2 years old I started thinking that maybe our family wasn't complete. But my cardiac issues remained and now that we had a child there was just too much at stake to think about taking the risk with another pregnancy. So we made a call to Catholic Community Services to ask about adoption. They sent us a packet of information and I put it away after looking through it. Adoption was overwhelming! It remained an option for someday in the back of my mind but I wasn't ready to go there yet.

Whenever I would roll the idea around in my mind I thought about the facts they had shared in the pamphlet; we were looking at a waiting period of at least 1-2 years, the cost was high, newborns were in high demand--and the birthparents had to pick you! About a year after my first call I called CCS again and they sent me the same packet as before and again I read it and we decided to wait until our daughter was 3 to start the process.

About 3 months before our daughter's third birthday I really started feeling like we were supposed to submit our application. Our one stumbling block was we didn't have the money to pay for the home-studies, social workers, attorney fees etc. But the feeling wouldn't go away so we submitted the application with the small application fee. Our literature said that the usual wait from the time of submitting the application until you actually could start the process was 6 months to 2 years. They only allowed a certain number of potential parents in to the program at a time so you had to wait. We decided that this time period would be when we would save money so we could actually afford to do this.

We were shocked when we were contacted less than a month later to begin adoption prep classes, the process was beginning! The classes were wonderful, we met weekly to learn the facts about adoption; what the process is like, closed vs open, what it's like to grow up adopted, what birthparents feel and think. We had panels with adult adoptees, birthmothers, adoptive parents and medical specialists who work with special needs and drug affected kids. It was a wealth of information and helped us know what we were entering into, and what our child would face as his reality. During this time we learned that our total costs would be around $7000. No problem because we ...um...ok, big problem--we had around $100 in savings. So we started asking friends and relatives to pray. We believed that God would provide the money if this was something he wanted us to do right then. When they asked for a specific amount we needed we told them $7000. And we went forward with the process believing that he would provide somehow if this was his will. About 4 months later we received a settlement for an auto accident that had happened about a year beforehand. The amount of the combined settlement that Rick and I received was, you guessed it, exactly $7000.

I'm not sure why God chose to bless us with the amount of money we needed in that way, but I know that it strengthened my faith. God could have provided the money through a second job, he could have provided the money through a long waiting time while we saved up. But he gave it to us in a lump sum that was exactly the amount that we had asked for. We still had a long wait and lots of emotional stress ahead of us. But now I knew concretely that we weren't in this process alone. God was there, he was in control and he would build our family.