So, here is where we are now as far as Caleb goes: We just got an email from our social worker today that said she has finished updating our homestudy. That is good news. The bad news is that she is waiting on one more thing to include in the homestudy. She needs the Illinois fingerprinting results. (For those of you who don't know, we lived in Illinois for two years when we were first married.) So, Andy will now have to contact someone in Illinois to figure out when we'll get that paperwork. Uggh. Poor Andy. Making phone calls to government offices aren't generally top on his list of things to do. But, that's what he'll be doing Monday morning.
I will try to do a bit of a re-cap of all that has been going on since we started this process in March. I'm generally not too good at keeping stories short, but I'll try. It will likely take a few days to tell even the short version. Here it is:
Andy and I had been talking and praying about adopting for years. I was ready to start the adoption process a l-o-n-g time ago. Andy wasn't. I clearly felt like God was calling us to adopt someone, somewhere, sometime. I knew that the time would be right when Andy was ready. I poked and prodded and tried to convince Andy for years that we needed to do this. That didn't turn out to be the most effective way to reach his heart. So I waited and really did believe that God would soften his heart toward adopting. He did and Andy was ready to begin the adoption process in March of 08.
There were all kinds of things we didn't know when we began this journey. Boy/girl...china/africa/ukraine/...baby/toddler/older child...sibling group...healthy/special needs...etc. We decided to start with one decision at at time. We chose an adoption agency in March and decided we would start the process slowly. Very slowly. We had just enough money to pay the $250.00 application fee and that was about it.
We completed the preliminary paperwork and were ready to take things slowly and hopefully have some (well, a lot of) time to somehow come up with all the money that we would need. As soon as we filled out the application paperwork, the agency sent us a huge binder filled with tons and tons of more paperwork. We had narrowed the countries that we would consider down to China and El Salvador based on the relatively short travel time and lower cost. Well, since we had shown an interest in China, the agency sent a piece of paper with colored photographs of "waiting children" in China. We didn't know what "waiting children" meant. But we did notice that they all had varying amounts of grant money available for each child. That sparked our interest because we didn't have anywhere near the $25,000 it was going to cost to adopt. Any grant money that was available, we were going to look in to.
Well, the "waiting children" title meant special needs and/or older child. We hadn't ever imagined or set out to adopt a special needs child at all. We seemed to think that our own healthy/non-special needs children require enough of our efforts that we couldn't really imagine inviting a more "needy" child into a our family. Let's just put it bluntly, our own children wear us out at times! But, there was one lonely looking sweet pudgey-faced little boy that caught our attention.
We requested more info on the "2 year old with repaired cleft lip/palate" child listed on the Waiting Children list. Here is what we got...
We got these two photos along with some very brief/sketchy info on "Ji Ru Ping". There was a week of "yes", this is who we will adopt and then "no", things didn't look like they were going to work out with him (there were a few other families interested in him as well) and on and on. At the end of the week, the bottom line was: he was still available. However, we had no money to proceed with the process. We needed to come up with $6,000 in about two weeks. We didn't have even close to that. We both had clear convictions that we should not go into debt to pay for the adoption. We were adopting out of a simple obedience to obey what we both felt God was calling us to do and complete faith that He would do what needed to be done to make it all happen. We certainly didn't have the money or a plan to work out all the details. We were trusting that God was in control. So, we prayed.
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