Our Journey

Over the next several days we want to post our journey of faith. God has been doing incredible things in our lives and we want to give Him the glory for His guidance, direction and patience.
We are so very excited about bringing Jada home to be with us. But we want to be honest with all of you. It has not been an easy path.

As some of you know we have been in process since May of 2006. There were delays in getting our paperwork completed which caused us to have a LID of January 2007. From the very beginning we knew God was leading us in this process. He gave us some wonderful confirmations.

As the timeline continued to grow with China our hearts began to open to children with special needs. Over the last 2 years we have patiently waited as our agency and then China changed the special needs program a number of times. During that time we opened our hearts to a number of little ones. Each time we would consider and then request a child with just a little larger need. Total today we have selected 11 different little ones, only to be told no each time.

A few weeks ago we opened our hearts to yet another little one. We really prayed and had others praying for us. We had such a hope that this would finally be our daughter. We loved her picture, we loved her need and really felt that God and prepared us for her. But yet again we were not selected. We were excited knowing that so many families requested her. We were told that 60 some families had requested her and that there were just a few who had been waiting longer – so we were not selected. Since that time we have continued to pray for her. Chloe hasn’t allowed us to even take down her picture because she wanted to pray and be her friend.

God is good. Becky was able to connect with the parents of this little girl through the wonder of the internet. Her name will be **** and we hope Chloe and her can be pen pals. How sweet to know that God allowed us to connect with her parents. We hope that we can continue to pray for her and see how God works in her life.

God does indeed work in ways beyond our understanding. I think He likes that. It keeps us having to trust in Him and not in ourselves. I think He likes it when we rely on Him more than we rely on ourselves. I think so often we try to teach our children to be self-sufficient and we don’t spend as much time to teaching them to be God-sufficient. He meets our needs and loves to do it. I think God has plans to continue teaching us how to rely on Him for all that we need.

Becky and I had just started to recover from what we considered a real loss in not receiving **** as our child. We didn’t understand why God didn’t give her to us and we were very disappointed. We began the process of praying, again, that God would bring the right child to us.

Just a week after finding out that we were not to be the parents of **** I, Joe, received a phone call at work at around 12:00. It was during a meeting I was conducting but the receptionist passed it to me in the meeting room. As I picked up the phone I noticed that the caller ID screen had the name Bethany Christian Services. I was really excited thinking that maybe this was the call we had been waiting for.

Heather, our wonderful social worker, explained that a child had been selected for us from the portal. She explained that we had a limited amount of time to make a decision and that we needed to have an answer as to whether to lock her in by 5:00. She mentioned that her special need involved her eyes and that she was born without irises. I have to say that the way she mentioned her need that it sounded like something rather simple and I kind of brushed it off. I thought to myself, “ no irises – that is neat because I had just noticed a few days earlier that it was rather hard to tell what color eyes Chloe had. In fact we always said Chloe’s eyes were brown but until just a few days before I hadn’t really paid attention.” So I hung up the phone, finished my meeting and then returned to my desk.

At that point I did what every techie parent would do and I googled “no irises”. Little did I know that I was starting a journey with ups and downs, twists and turns. I learned that the scientific name for this condition was called Aniridia. I read the information and an instant fear settled into my heart.

To be continued: