photo by Heather Bleeke

We have been busy over here at Team Ward overseeing details for our adoption, including doing fundraisers, preparing photo books for the adoption agency, and working on an online adoption profile for birth moms to look at.  It’s crazy to put your family out there and hope that a birth mom will find some connection with you.

Most days, I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas.

When will this baby come?  Will it be a boy or girl?  What should I be doing now that I won’t be able to do for the next five years with a baby/toddler/preschooler?

You’d think by adoption #3 I’d have this down, but instead I’m just as clueless as ever.

I like to pretend I have the answers, but here’s the real answer: Adoption is mostly a crapshoot. We could get a baby in three weeks or in three years. I’m just praying for sooner rather than later, because friends, I’m not getting any younger.

Since I can’t seem to learn life’s lessons other than the hard way, I find myself, all too often, in situations that test my faith, patience and perseverance. Yay for me. The hard road is so much fun. This is, apparently, the only way for me to learn to trust God’s will 100% and to accept I have no say in the matter.

I’d like to think I’m getting better at this lesson after going through infertility, cancer, adoption, and my son’s terminal illness and death.

But no matter how many things you’ve been through, living in the unknown is always hard.  

First, you find out your not in control.

Second, you find out who or what you really believe.

The last one is the scariest.  It peels back the layers of everything we believe in order to expose the real question:

Are you really going to trust God?

If I answer yes, there are dozens of unknowns that I have to give up in our adoption process–my child’s health, the birth mom’s health, exposure to drugs, violence, abuse, you name it. The list is not fun.

When you are a type A personality like me, giving up control involves radical sacrifice.

It means surrendering to God’s will, a process often riddled with questions and difficult answers. It involves saying “Not my will, by thy will.”  And then you have to live this out.

But this process of giving up involves another action:  It means we hold on to God’s promises even more. When we give up control, we embrace his promises more.  We let go of one thing and hold on tighter to another.

This means believing God’s promise when He says:

His promise is to prosper and not to harm.  While I can’t have all the answers now, while I can’t control this situation, while I can’t do anything but pray–I know that his plan is always to prosper and not to harm.

This is a promise for both me and my children.  And if you’re a believer, that’s a promise for you too.

We see this plan unfolding in our adoption.  We didn’t know how we’d pay $26,000 for our adoption, but you all have blessed our socks off.

I thought God’s plan for raising this money was going to involve me getting a really awesome and well paying job. I know. I aim high. Though I have had some wonderful part time work over the last few years, it hasn’t really been the adoption windfall I was thinking of.

Now I see why: A lucrative job might have caused me to trust myself for my needs, instead of God.

Not getting what we wanted, the way we wanted it, was really a gift–a pivotal moment when we had to decide to trust God and not ourselves. We knew that if this adoption thing was going to happen, we had to put our need out there, trusting that the money would come in. We had to believe His plan would be done His way.

His plan, His way.

When we decided to raise our final $10,000, we thought that maybe, just maybe, by springtime we could raise it.  So we set our goal at 200 days, launched our fundraiser, put out a few blogs and waited.

Then the donations started coming in, one after another, like a slow trickle of rain that turned into a steady downpour.

In only a month’s time we have reached 85%, which means we are just about to our goal.  AMAZING.

I am so happy and grateful for this community of adoption supporters. You are the best and we could not be doing this without you.

Sam and I are thinking of ways to say thank you more personally, but until then, we wanted to say thank you for donating, sharing our fundraiser, and even encouraging us along the way.

While we’re learning about trust and giving up control, we’re also learning the truth about His will.  His plan, His way.