The song While I'm Waiting by John Waller is constantly going through my head. Six months is not a long time at all, for adoption. But it feels like a very long time, knowing that our children are out there, out of our reach for now. It's sometimes heartbreaking, and often it takes all the strength I have to leave them in God's hands. We were channeling all that energy into preparing our home study and dossier up until now. But now that the dossier is in the hands of the State Department of Adoptions in Ukraine, I can't do anything for our daughters except pray, and ask others to pray for them too.
We've been praying for our girls for years, actually. I remember when Claire was a baby, more than 6 years ago, I was telling someone about our hope to adopt someday. It dawned on me suddenly, like lightning and thunder right there in the middle of a bookstore, that I might already have a child somewhere in the world! At that very moment, our child or children could already have been born into a family that, for whatever reason, wouldn't or couldn't take care of them.
Only God knew who, and where, and when, and what they would have to endure on their journey to get to our family. I've spent the last 6 years since then asking God to take care of our kids, if they were already in this world.
It turns out that I was right. At that moment 6 years ago, Tatiana was already 2 years old. We don't know if she was happy, or healthy, or already diagnosed with diabetes at that time. We don't know who took care of her, or how well they took care of her. We may never know exactly what we missed. We just have to trust that they were in God's hands, and that His timing was, and is, perfect.
So we've been waiting to find them for a long time, and they've been waiting for us for a long time... And God's been waiting for us to finally be obedient to Him for a really long time.
So compared to all of that, these next few weeks of waiting REALLY aren't that long after all.
