Coming Up for Air

I love roller coasters. I love the twists and turns and upside down loops. I love how quickly you race along the track and the feeling of flying through the air. They could be terrifying if you didn't trust the engineer and all the safety equipment that harnesses you in, but if you trust the mechanics of it, it can be a truly unbelieveable ride. One time I was at Six flags with my youth group and one of the students was nervous. "What if my harness comes undone?" I assured her it would be fine but the more I stood in line and thought about the answer to that question, I got a little nervous myself. You see I started to doubt.

Why do I share this with you? Because the month of July was one of the worst roller coasters I have ever been on! We were thrilled to be nearing the end of our dossier paperwork. All we needed was one last piece of paper to arrive in the mail and we would be able to place a huge check mark on our "to do" list.

I hadn't heard anything from the agency in Kentucky (despite having sent in a ton of photos and documents over a week ago) so I decided to place a phone call to follow up. The day unraveled from there and ended with me in a ball on the couch sobbing. Several of our documents were missing. Big important documents that involved fingerprinting, state clearances, expensive fees and long waits.

I called our agency in NJ that is helping us with our home study and adoptive parent classes, to see if they knew where the paperwork was. Turns out they had it (roller coaster goes back up a bit) but they refused to release it to the Kentucky agency because another document was missing. (small drop)This document is similar to the HIPPA laws in medical care. It has to be signed by us and both agencies saying that it's legal for all of our information to be shared between one another. The NJ office had received an email on June 12th saying our inter agency agreement never went through (mind you this was almost a full month prior to my phone call and no one called to tell us this). The impact of this document being missing meant that our ENTIRE process needed to be thrown out, redone, and that the agency in NJ could loose it's license for adoption (my roller coaster took a huge gut wrenching drop).

To top it all off several of the people needed to sign these documents were on overlapping vacations and couldn't fix anything until they got back!

In the same day I called back to the Kentucky agency to make them aware of the inter agency error and was met with more bad news. Our FBI/US Immigration paperwork was filled out incorrectly by the government agent and had been sent incorrect to Uganda. I had no idea what the ramifications of this would be but I knew it was bad and possibly costly. My roller coaster felt stuck upside down in a loop.

In the end I worked my butt off to get all the documents corrected and in their proper destinations. Several overnight fedex bills later, things seemed to be right again with the world. The roller coster was almost back on track. Now we were only waiting to have our government forms corrected and they were avoiding my very frequent calls.

In the midst of it all I felt like I was drowning. I began to doubt God's goodness and control. I didn't think my harness would hold. I mean I knew it in my heart but my heart was broken. My roller coaster was out of control and I felt like my harness was coming undone.

On Friday, July 20th I was nearly numb as I drove to an adoption support group at a local church. Part of me wondered if there was even an adoption to support anymore. However, after talking with some of the families in attendance (and running into an old friend from high school that's also adopting) it was like coming up for air.

Our family had been supportive and compassionate about the disappointment and outrage over so many human errors delaying our adoption process, but it's nearly impossible to understand the journey unless you've walked it yourself. These families were able to remind me once again that we are not adopting because Cara needs a younger brother (even though she's soooo excited  about it), we're adopting because God has given us a heart to love the wounded. To unconditionally love children who will do their best to tear our lives apart and make us believe they're unlovable. To raise children who have been forgotten, abused and tossed aside and who will always live in fear of it happening again. Without using the direct words these families unknowlingly assured me that it's worth it, because if we don't love these kids, who will?

On July 27th (my30th birthday) we got an email from the adoption agency saying that two new families traveled home in July (yeah!!!) but that they have not been able to make any new matches in over 4 months! There is a lot of politics and paperwork in the way of these poor children coming home.

Just as I was about to hit the emergency break and reconsider if the roller coaster ride was worth it, we found out on August 1st (9 months exactly into our official process) that our paperwork was all in and approved. Just a few days later we found out that we're officially family #8 on the waiting list for our orphanage. It will still be a long wait (possibly even more than a year) to be matched but we've reached a huge checkpoint in the process. A lot it still unknown but what is known is that even when it feels out of control and the heartbreak seems unbearable, God is still at work.

So in the words of our good friend Melody, "Let the countdown begin!"