Faith & Foresight

Oh my goodness...we thought the Haiti door had closed loud and clear when we heard back from USCIS that there was nothing we could do about sending the wrong amount of money with our Orphan Petition.  But that door opened back up on Monday after talking with our agency.  We are still okay in Haiti...don't totally understand the details, but apparently the final step to becoming Hague accredited has not yet gone through the proper channels.  Once that is received in the U.S., there will be a 90-day window that allows adoptions to procede as usual.  So we are still okay!  Praises, praises, and more praises are being sent to our faithful God!

So what was the purpose of the many bumps along the way?  Roadblocks that seemed to be pointing us in a totally different direction?  Well, Bruce and I spent four days thinking we had to choose a different country, potentially an entirely new agency.  That led us to several other agencies' websites, searching again through listings of "waiting children."  These waiting children are kids who are harder to adopt...either because they are older than what most adoptive parents are looking for, or they are part of a sibling group, or they have some sort of special need (medical, developmental, behavioral, etc).

Previously, we applied to adopt a "healthy" child between the ages of 0-5.  While searching for the right answers in those four days of limbo, we found ourselves being drawn to a couple of little boys who would not have met our "healthy" child standard.  These little boys are not from Haiti or another country that our agency works in, so they are not going to be ours...but these little boys made us search deep within ouselves to find out what we really do think we can handle.  Each of these boys had developmental delays related to medical complications as infants...both were three years old and receiving speech and physical therapies.  Well, goodness gracious!  I AM a speech therapist!  And we DO own a therapy company, for crying out loud!  We have our very own physical and occupational therapists.  Why WOULDN'T we consider special needs? 

Gosh, when we hear that everything happens for a reason, it is so very true.  Hindsight is so clear while foresight just requires faith.  Faith that God knows EXACTLY what He is doing, even when we have no idea why.