A Whole New World!

When all of the red tape is cut and the journeys overseas are made, we will be bringing a child into our hearts and home… how much we anticipate this day! For us, it will be a day of joy, of promises fulfilled!

But not for our child. On that day, our child will lose everything he or she has ever known, ever loved, ever found comfort in. The familiar walls of the orphanage, maybe the only home he or she has ever known, will be replaced by the unknown. The uncaring caregivers will go away, only to be replaced by us (Mommy and Daddy!) but we will speak with foreign words – even the sounds we use will be different and strange. The sounds, sights, smells, and even tastes of their new world will be completely unknown and alien to our child. What courage it will take to face this new world! What horrible fears will have to be overcome… all without knowing what joys lie ahead!

One of my prayers is that God will prepare our child for what is to come… for us, for the new world he or she will step into. I pray that God will give our child faith and courage to bravely face the unknown in order to obtain the promise of a family– even if the knowledge of what “family” means is incomplete. I ask God to make the holes in our child’s heart shaped like us so that when the time comes for us to meet, we will be recognized as the filler of those holes that have been caused by abandonment and living life without a parent’s love. How Ian and I yearn to fill these holes with our parental love! We do want to mend the mind and body of our little one – to teach him or her wisdom, to provide an education that will equip him or her for the life ahead, to provide medical care (as we are adopting a special-needs orphan), to nourish him or her with good food! But more importantly, we want to mend our little one’s heart that has been broken by poverty, neglect, and abandonment.

The longer we travel this adoption journey, the more of glimpses I get of God’s heart for our adoption into His family. Oh, how He must long for us! And yes, He knows that the holes in our hearts desperately need healing and that the world we are living in now can do nothing to fill those holes. How we need to come to Him for this healing and care, nourishment, and education! And LOVE! The world of faith we step into to get close to Him is foreign, strange, and at times scary! And, to tell the truth, we have no clue as to the rewards and blessings we enter into when we step into the world of our Abba Father!

So I pray for God’s children too, the same things I pray for my child. It breaks my heart sometimes, when I see the orphan in my friends, family, coworkers… in myself. We are afraid and alone, abandoned. But how we cling to the only thing we have ever known – to the fear, the loneliness, to our loveless world! If only we could see the Father reaching out to us with open arms of love and healing in His wings!

Pearl Hunting

Some things are not worth chasing after – like becoming a billionaire or obtaining that elusive pant size you wore in high school. It doesn’t matter how hard you try; it is most likely that you will never achieve your goal, or, if you do, it won’t be worth the cost.

Some things are worth pursuing… a good job, a college education. It may be hard work to obtain these things, but it pays off in the end.

And then there are things that are of such value that even if you must give your all to obtain it, it is far and beyond worth it. The value of the item far exceeds the amount of time, energy, and resources that you exchange for it.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” Matthew 13:45, 46.

Our beloved Father has offered Ian and me a piece of the kingdom of heaven – the opportunity to love and parent one of his little ones who has already suffered great injustices because of the sin and selfishness of the fallen world in which we live. We have been given the chance to be His hand of redemption; taking a life that has been all but thrown away and loving and nourishing it as our own dear child.

Now, I won’t lie – I will occasionally whine and complain on how much this has and will cost – in time, effort, not to mention the huge chunk of change we will have to come up with to pay all the people making this happen. But when I step back and take a moment to ask God what He thinks, I hear His voice telling me that this child is a pearl – but not just any pearl – one of extraordinary value. He constantly reassures us that this will be more than worth it.

I also hear His voice telling me “God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed” (2 Corinthians 2:9). We don’t know how we will be able to come up with the cost of this great pearl, but we know that God will provide. I know that sounds cliché, but I know in my heart that not only is it true – but it will happen. God is a promise keeper. So while we pour out our meager funds, energy, time, even giving up our pride (probably the hardest of all to give up), God will take and multiply it – it will be “pressed down, shaken together, and running over” (Luke 6:38).

There is good news in this for you too, dear reader! The pearls of the kingdom of heaven are many! And our Father has equipped you too with the resources to go out and buy! The promises that He has given to Ian and me are not ours alone – they belong to all of His people who are called by His name. He has laid out the great adventure of pearl hunting for each of us. Some of your pearls may be the ministry He has called you to, or Christ-like love and devotion to your spouse. Maybe, just maybe, He has given you a pearl like ours – a child from a distant land. There is only one way to know… ask Him!

Paper Pregnancy

So we are paper pregnant!

And still in the first trimester.

Paper pregnancies are funny things – they last longer than nine months, that’s for sure! Our first trimester is lasting forever it seems – we filled out paperwork like crazy, even went and got our fingerprints done for our background checks (local, state, and federal for everywhere we have lived since we were eighteen years old) and had a doctor poke and prod us and declare us medically fit for parenting. Hurrah! We were nearing the end when, SURPRISE, the State of Virginia decided we needed to do more paperwork!

The major part of this paperwork is preparing an emergency plan for our future family, which is to be posted at the child’s eye level and reviewed with them every six months.  Now I don’t doubt that creating an emergency plan is a wonderful idea, but really? What are we, a motel with the evacuation plan posted on the back of the door? Our child will not be able to speak English, much less read it. And we or another competent adult will be there at all times to care for the kid. Of course, we will be teaching our child(ren) that when you see you see smoke or fire… you get out! So yes, it is well meaning but I feel it is more appropriate of a standard for a business rather than a home. However, it is another hoop to jump through, so we will start preparing our “Apocalypse” plan and turn it in to get this show on the road! We will then be able to schedule our home visits (in our lovely new apartment). When they are finished and we get approved, we will be finished with our first trimester! And, praise God and thanks to our wonderful friends, we have all the funds necessary for this section of the adoption!

So what then, you ask?

Once we get approved, we can move forward with being matched to a child – either of our own choosing from a waiting list or chosen by the Bulgarian government. This will be our second trimester and will include the preparation of the dossier and gaining approval from U.S. Immigration to bring an adoptive child into the U.S. Essentially, we have to fill out the same information as for the home study, plus more. We will then have it notarized and appostilled (which is like a super notarizing) and sent over to Bulgaria for translation and review. And then we wait. And wait. And wait to be matched to a child, after which we will be able to travel to see him or her! So while the second trimester may be a very long wait, it is very exciting because we will finally be able to find out details about our child – similar to an ultrasound, we will find out the sex and see a few pictures as well as many other facts about his or her health and parentage if they are available. This is also a very important time for the financial aspect of an adoption – we will have to raise funds like mad, apply to every grant out there available, and throw all our spare change in to make it to the next step. Check out our fundraising progress on the side bar of our blog to see how far we have come!

Our third trimester is the shortest part of the whole paper pregnancy. We will be given travel dates and be off to Bulgaria! All our funds will need to be in at this point, with the last of the expenses being travel costs. We have two required trips – the first one to get to know our child a little before we finalized the adoption and the second to pick up our sweet bundle of joy and complete the last bit of paperwork. The first trip will be a little longer than a week – five total visits to the orphanage where we will have 45 minutes to an hour a day with our child. Then we say “Yes! This is my son/daughter!” and go back to the States while the lawyers do the hard work in the Bulgarian court system.  When we receive the final ruling, about a month after the first trip, we will be given the dates for our second trip (only about four or five days in length) and will bring our little one home! A new Elliott will be “born”!

Tent Pegs Extended!

Diary of a Soon-to-be Daddy

This week, I thought I would foray back into my blog-writing and do this week’s blog. It’ll probably be a short one since I am writing this on my lunch break at work and have plenty of pressing government-y things to keep me busy today.

As most of you know by now, last week Mel and I moved apartments. We had been getting fed up with poor maintenance in our last place, the bad attitude espoused by the apartment’s management company and staff, the low standards they apparently set for everything, and the general disrepair and decrepitude the building and its inhabitants had been falling in to. We had been looking for new apartments for a few months but had found nothing that would suit our modest yet specific needs in our modest yet specific price range. We had almost given up hope and resigned ourselves to another year of broken laundry machines, cracked walls, and crack-addicted people, but the Lord in His infinite mercy had something up his sleeve. He wanted us to extend our tent pegs and He was about to show us how.

In late March, I was praying about Mel’s and my situation when the Lord took me to Isaiah 54. In it, he tells the Israelites to extend their tent pegs as He was about to expand them as a people and make their inhabitants fill the desolate cities of the earth after years of exile and suffering. The direction to this verse was definitely the Lord, as I had not been studying Isaiah at the time, nor had I done much study of it previously. However, the fact that my lengthy period of unemployment and underemployment prior to starting at Boeing last year had made me sometimes feel as the Israelites did whilst in exile – desperate, forlorn, and miserable made the verse hit close to home. But I had never seen this verse before within its context and so it was not something I would ordinarily turn to. In fact, I came to it in a rather roundabout way (I’ll give you the fuller story if you want, but not here). Needless to say, the instruction seemed pertinent. However, my skeptical mind began to dismiss it. “Ah, perhaps it’s a coincidence,” I thought. “I probably read this verse long ago and somehow my subconscious brought it to mind due to our current situation.” My skeptical mind, borne of years of liberal education and a relatively trying existence on this earth, had to have its rightful say. But I was sure of the Lord’s instruction. I knew it in my spirit and I felt that this was the push we needed to try again at the apartment hunt.

Just then, Mel burst into the spare room with a load of laundry. “The laundry machines on our floor, the eighth floor, and the tenth floor are mostly all broken,” she huffed. “We’ve got to move!”  That was all the confirmation I needed! When the laundry was done she went online and looked again for an apartment that we could afford. After only minutes of looking, she came across an apartment building literally right down the street from us that we could afford, was modern with modern amenities, and was something we could raise a kid or two in with not too much difficulty! We looked at it and knew that it was the place we were going to move to! All in one evening our apartment hunt had restarted, taken a turn for the better, and been basically completed!

Long story short, after that, we viewed a couple floor plans in person, picked one that we hadn’t seen that was available on May 31 when our then-current lease was up, hired some movers, got all packed up, and moved! The move went well; the movers didn’t try to convince me that my antique bookshelf “always had three legs instead of four” like the last movers did, and we are now getting settled in our new place.

The conclusion of our adoption is still a ways off, but we have taken an important step. We have moved from a living space that fits the needs of a married couple into a place that suits the needs of a family with a small kid. The Lord pointed the way, provided the means (my amazing new job and an apartment we could afford that we somehow had missed up until then) and gave us the strength and amazing friends helping out to get it done. The move now being out of the way, I am convinced, the Lord will keep His promise to give us descendants that will inhabit the desolate cities of the earth.