Aberle, Party of...Three

Sometimes things don't really go like you planned. Or, if you're like me, things definitely don't go the way you planned, so you made plan B. And just when you got used to plan B, plan C appeared. And while you're trying to discover how you feel about Plan C, Plan D arrives on the scene.

I don't know which plan we're really on. I've lost count.

About two weeks ago, our adoption agency contacted us. "There's an almost two-year-old Polish boy available with some special needs. Are you interested in seeing his information?"

We were. This was not what we had planned. In some ways it was better. We would have him home in April or May. He was significantly younger than we'd thought. But we weren't sure he would have the best opportunities here, with us. Were we capable of being the parents he needed?

The same day we received videos of him (and what a sweetie! what a personality! I love him), we got a phone call from someone else. For the last five months, we were being considered to adopt a local infant. It fell through in December and we decided to move on.

Now, they were desperately looking for someone to take this child (not yet born, due in April). The people they'd originally selected were not working out.

But the problem was that if we said yes to one child, we had to say no to the other. We could not (were not allowed to) take both.

I find no words to describe how difficult and painful this decision was for us. For one thing, it made look at myself and my motives, my desires and my plans. I thought I had reconciled that the way I had wanted to build a family was not the way that God wanted to build our family. I thought I was trusting God to take care of it, but I realized that it hurt me very deeply that we were being asked to make a decision like this.

What kind of crazy world is this? I wondered. What IS the right thing to do? Bryan and I were not prepared for this emotional turmoil. We thought that we would be overjoyed (and a little scared) about seeing the information on our children for the first time. We thought it would be exciting.

It wasn't like that. I still struggle to name the source of this pain. I opened up an email this afternoon from a friend who has both adopted children and biological children. She said that there is physical travail in childbirth and emotional travail in adoption. While I haven't experienced childbirth, I imagine this anguish in our hearts in similar to the pain of that.

We don't have an amazing story that lend us to make our decision. We hope we're making the right one. All I can say is that we feel God's comfort and embrace. Last week, our hearts were anxious and overwhelmed. Today, we're still wondering exactly what the future holds, we still have a lot of decisions to make (and not a lot of time to make them), and we are nervous about being parents. (My word, how do people do this and survive?).

One of things I read this week was, if God is not Master of ALL, He is not Master AT ALL. And that is giving us strength to go on. Even though this is painful for us, and even though it seems like a big decision and even though we understand so little, it's not big at all compared to what others are going through.

So, yes, Lord willing, we will become a party of three in April. We opted for the infant (also a boy!). We feel like we let the Polish boy down, but I got an email this morning that there is a Polish couple interested in him. Yes, his agency preferred the US because they thought he would have more opportunities, but we're happy that he will have parents who love him.

Things could still fall through for the infant. It's a complicated situation that makes it more high-risk than some, but we will trust that if this boy is ours, it will all work out. We pray for his birthparents and we're grateful they have made this decision to entrust him to us.