Today is April 2 and we received an update on our daughter. Yes we have a daughter in China! It is wonderful to see a new picture and video of her from today. It’s still weird to say she is our daughter but in my heart she has been for a long time. I guess I need to go back a little and my plan was to write this blog once a week or so until it was caught up to where we are at with our adoption and then just let it flow from there, But here I am changing it.
Mid January Shelly and I started to seriously look at some of the children the adoption agency has on line that are on a Waiting Child list with Special Focus. We started focusing on one particular girl who was 9 years old. We talked back and forth and looked at other kids but kept coming back to her. We wanted to look at her file but we were afraid to ask for it. What if we felt she was the one and since we just started this process someone else with a completed home study locked her in? What if the items inside her file was more than we could handle? What kind of guilt would we have if we said no to her. These were new questions we hadn’t even thought about until that point.
On January 26, 2020 we decided to asked to see her file and received it on the 28th of January. There was lots of reports and abundance of pictures and videos of her. We were told that most files didn’t have near this many pictures and videos and they were surprised that her’s did. The reports were in Chinese and English. There was a MRI of her brain which was a little scary because they were sharing it for a reason. Yes there are medical issues but that pretty much is expected with all international adoptions out of China. I am not going to share her issues yet because I am not sure how I feel about posting them at this point. We took her file and I must had read every page 10 or more times. Going over every little thing wondering what it means, googling every medical term. Questioning my resolve to handle these issues and any others that may be unknown.
We shared her file with Connecting Kids With Care, a volunteer doctor organization who looks at adoption files and gives a medical review of what is in the file for free. This took about two weeks to receive the two reports back. One was a general medical assessment and one was a neurology assessment. The first one to come back was the general assessment. It answered some questions and gave us hope to deal with some of the issues in her file. Then the neurology assessment came in. It gave me doubt and fear. Not only about her medical needs but mostly about who I truly am. When times are hard is when we find out who we are inside. What kind of character we have. This worried me, am I a person that can deal with these issues. Matthew 15:18 “But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a man.”, James 3: 11 “Does a spring pour out sweet and bitter water from the same opening?” What is inside of a vessel will always come out when the correct pressure is applied. I had doubts, but every time I opened her file and saw her picture, my heart would melt. I could hear God telling me that this was His daughter and wanted us to make her our daughter as well. Even with that peace being given to me I still wanted to doubt it. Is this just what I want to hear or is God really telling me this? One morning on the way to work I was praying and asking God for a confirmation that she was the one. The next car that passed me had her Chinese name on the licence plate and as I also passed a 18 wheeler I looked over and saw her name again on the back of that truck. I know there are people who will say the mind sees what it wants but I know that God was speaking to me.
Shelly and I asked what we needed to do to make her part of our family. We were told we needed to write a Letter of Intent(LOI) to be sent to China and that even if they accepted it she would not be truly “locked” in until our Home Study is finished. On March 16,2020, about two weeks after we turned in our LOI we received an email containing our pre-approval from China. Fantastic news right, except now we have a deadline to be done with everything because they put a cut off date. I like having a goal but with this whole Corona-virus shutting everything down it makes me a little anxious but I know the ONE that is in charge and everything is in His time not ours.
Our Home Study has been turned in from our fantastic social worker and we are waiting on the agency to approve it. Then our daughter can be locked in for sure. Back to what we received today. I opened an email from CCAI today and it had two new pictures and one Video of our daughter. I will have to say I teared up. It was fantastic to see a picture and video that was less than 24 hours old of her. We know she is safe and she looks well. Life has its stresses and its hardships but Christ is always there to show us how grand things are even in the storm.
I want to say thank you to Shannon our social worker and all the great people we have interacted with so far at CCAI. We have months left in this process and I am glad to have had them helping us and I know they will continue to help us bring our youngest daughter home.
