The Long Road to Brianna, Part II

When I left off, we had just decided to pursue adoption. I called the agency (whose newsletters I'd been reading for the past several years) and we signed up. That was it. No research. No questions. No joining various groups to ask for opinions or references. Just, "Where do we sign, and how much do we make the first check out for?" What dopes! My favorite saying for this is that "God's grace is with the simple-minded."


Even though I was thrilled that we were finally going to do this, I still had my worries. I was afraid that we may have missed God's timing. What if the child God had originally intended to be ours had already been given to someone else because we'd waited too long? What if she had been wasting away, suffering from neglect, in some orphanage and would never be able to attach to us. What if, what if, what if?


Adding to those worries were a million other little things. I flunked my medical exam and had to have additional tests run before I could be cleared. We had major financial setbacks right when it was time to start shelling out the big money. There seemed to be all kinds of delays with getting our dossier together. After waiting so long, I had no patience left to wait for anything else, but it felt like that's all I was doing. Waiting. It took 10 months to finally get our dossier to China. It was another 13 months to get our referral. All that time we waited with barely a word from our agency. And I continued to worry that we had missed God. The "what ifs" drove me nuts. And I drove Darrell nuts. His nature is so much calmer than mine. He told me all along that if I truly believed this was of God, then I also had to believe we would get the baby God had meant for us.

When our referral finally came, there were several confirmations that she was "our girl" right away. For one thing, I had always had a definite mental picture of how she would look. I even tried to draw the little girl of my imagination so I could compare later on and see how close she was to the real thing. I never did feel like I got the facial features to match my mental image just exactly right, but the baby in my drawing had a huge "peter pan" collar.

This is the first photo we received of Bri.

See the collar?

I always thought that was pretty cool. Then we counted back from her birth date and realized she was conceived the same month Darrell finally changed his mind and we started the adoption, AND she was born the same month our documents got to China.

Today, there is no doubt in my mind that the timing was in God's hands all along. What seemed to me like a lack of faith and cooperation on Darrell's part, I now view as a deliberate attempt on God's end to hold him back until the right time. I would have jumped right in, and possibly missed God whispering for me to be patient and wait. Every second of waiting had a purpose. We weren't waiting for a dossier. Or a medical report. Or money, or a referral, or anything else. We were waiting for Brianna. God wasn't going to let our adoption move one second faster than it was supposed to because a faster adoption would have resulted in the referral of a different baby. Not our baby. Bri was our baby.

The confirmations didn't end with the referral. God is so incredibly good! They kept coming even after we got to China, but I'll tell you about that later.

If you are waiting for your child today, I hope you can believe that there is a purpose to your wait. Hang in there. It is soooo worth it.