The Wait...

Our agency has matched 10 more special needs children to families this week! Slowly but surely, we are inching closer to the top of the list to get our referral.
As I was out walking tonight, I reflected on the time that we have waited so far. Mike and I have talked about adopting a child even before we were married. We did not know if we would do a domestic adoption and an international adoption, but we knew that we wanted to give a home to a child that needed one. Cole and Alex were born, and we still felt that our family was not complete.
It was November of 2007 when I started to feel an extremely strong pull towards adopting a child from China. Mike was worried that the boys were too young to bring in another child, but we discovered that after all of the paperwork was complete, we would still have a year or two to wait. I just had this urgent feeling that we needed to get our paperwork gathered (it is a very long, tedious process) and off to China. We really felt that God was telling us that we had a daughter in China. It took us until April of 2007 to get all of our paperwork sent off to China and then the real wait began.
However, in the fall of 2007 I kept having this nagging feeling that something was wrong. I kept feeling like we missed something or that God was trying to tell me something. We talked about the special needs program and even ordered the packet of special needs paperwork from our agency. I remember one day at work feeling really sad with this feeling that our daughter was sick or had some kind of health problem. When the special needs packet arrived, Mike and I carefully read over all of the special needs that we might consider, but every single one of them scared the heck out of us. We talked about the possibility of a heart condition, but we got too scared and filed the papers away in the adoption box in the closet.
Fast forward to April of 2008. I was sitting at the computer on the last day of my spring break. We were just about to hit our 1 year anniversary of officially waiting for our daughter, and I kept coming across blogs and websites with little Chinese girls with heart defects. Every single picture of every single little girl seemed to feel like it was my daughter looking back at me. I called Mike at work and said we needed to talk. I remember he asked if we could talk when he got home and I said, "No, we need to talk now!" We talked for a little while and by the time he got home from work he was also convinced that our daughter has a heart condition. We finally made the decision to talk to our doctors and our social worker and then turn in our medical checklist to officially enter the waiting child program. I remember feeling the same sense of relief that I felt when we made the decision to go forward with the adoption. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders that we were back on the right path.
Now, as we edge closer and closer to getting our referral, we pray that God will give us the wisdom to know when we get our referral that it is the right referral for us. We do not want to take on more than we can handle. We pray that the doctors will give us the right information and that the decision to accept the referral will come easily.