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Waiting for your child to come home when you are trying to adopt can be both a trying and exhausting experience. As an adoptive mother, I often felt that the theme for my life should have been “hurry up and wait.” Even from the beginning when I would rush through parts of my dossier that I could control, I would find myself stuck waiting on a social worker to get around to finishing my homestudy.
If you’ve adopted internationally, you know how emotionally exhausting it can be to wait for your I-171H approval from the Immigration department that allows you to adopt an orphan from another country. You find yourself checking your watch each day waiting for the mail to come, only to have your hopes dashed when it doesn’t arrive, knowing you now have another full 24 hours to wait before you can check again.
If you’ve adopted via the foster care system, you know it can take an act of God to even get a caseworker to call you back or send you an email. Doing a private domestic adoption? It may take what feels like eternity for a birthparent to choose your file.
If you are in the act of waiting right now, I would like to share some uplifting thoughts that I heard at a church conference address…”Sunday will come.” What, you ask is that supposed to mean?
Christ was crucified on a Friday. When He died, there could not have been any greater loss for the world. Even a Roman centurion, was noted to have said, “Truly this was the Son of God” as the whole world groaned and shook over the loss.
We all have our Fridays. Whether it is waiting on paperwork, waiting for a referral, waiting while your chosen country’s program either has a slowdown or a total shutdown, we all have days during our adoptions where we feel we just can’t take another delay or wait for one more day.
I can offer you one assurance, however; Sunday will come. Just as the day of Christ’s crucifixion was the darkest mankind had known, on Sunday morning He was resurrected, offering an eternal hope to the world. As surely as day follows night, Sunday will come. Sunday will come in your adoption process as well.
Micheline’s adoption took 19 long months after I put her on hold for our family. 19 long months of staring at her photo, visiting her in Haiti only to leave in tears each time, and 19 long months of watching her grow older in an orphanage rather than my home…and knowing there was nothing I could do about it.
Now that she has been home for two years, however, the pain of those long months of waiting has diminished considerably. The day I got the phone call from my attorney in Haiti that Micheline was legally ours, I knew that Sunday was dawning. Being Haiti, we still had some pretty strenuous hoops to jump through to get her passport, but Sunday did indeed come, and home she came.
If you are struggling feeling that your file will never be chosen by a birth mom, or wondering if your country program will ever get moving, or wondering if the children you are fostering will ever become legally clear for adoption, I can promise you that Sunday will come. It might not come in the time frame or manner that you want, but if you leave it in God’s capable hands, He will take care of it and the child you were meant to have will join your family. Often parents say that the child they ended up with could not be any more perfect for their family, and that though the wait was unbearable at times, it was all worth it later when their child came home. No matter how difficult it may see right now, Sunday will indeed come.
An adoption poem: Hoping, Praying and Waiting
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