"The Second One"

I honestly don’t even know how to best write this.

There are so many things I want to express, yet so little I understand.  How God works, how He chooses… so many things.

What I do know is this:  today, my friends, we REJOICE.

We have waited for what often seemed like forever.  Too long, it has felt.  More than two years have passed since we first stepped out in faith and applied to adopt a little girl from Ethiopia.  We have been on the wait list since August 2010.

There were times we nearly lost faith, when we questioned God’s plan and His power.  When we thought we knew who our daughter was, only to have God say “not yet”.  When we wallowed in self-pity and lashed out in anger at the plight of one whose face we could not see… for her birth family, for all the little ones like her stuck in orphanages while impersonal politics loomed large and hope — for her, for them — seemed naive at best.

Then on Friday morning at 11:15am (MST), my phone rang.  I heard the first few notes of the song I had programmed to play ONLY if our adoption agency called from a particular number with our referral.  I tell you, the first stanza didn’t finish before I dropped the laundry in my hands and whipped that phone out of my back pocket.  Our coordinator had me on speaker phone; all the other office folks were in her office with her to listen in (we live just across the street from our agency, so they all know me quite well!).

I heard:  ”This is Allison!  Did I call you from the right number?”

Me:  ”If you’re calling with a REFERRAL you did!!!!!!”

Allison:  ”I am!!”

And then I collapsed onto the stairs, freaked out a little, and started shaking uncontrollably.  Normal reaction, right?

Long story short, a few minutes later my husband rushed home from work and we drove across the street to the agency, where we stood at Allison’s desk and first saw the picture of an absolutely gorgeous little eight-month old brown-eyed girl with super-long eyelashes and the cutest lips EVER puckering up and blowing a kiss to the camera.

She has some spunk, that one.  ;)

(we can’t show you her “smoochy” face until we pass court, but just look at that adorable bald head!)

We then learned that our sweet baby girl’s name means “the second one” in Amharic, which has significance I’m sure to her birth family (I hope we’ll find out as we go through the process) but also to us… it was as if God directly spoke to us when we read those words, telling us that THIS one, the “second one”, was ours.  That all the waiting was necessary, because she hadn’t yet been born when we thought we were about to be matched back in March 2011.  That His timing was perfect.  That THIS child would need OUR family.  That we would need her just as much, right now.

That He was worthy of our trust and our praise.   Always had been… always would be.

Adoption is rife with a strange mix of joy and pain, of beauty alongside ashes, of both broken and fulfilled dreams.  We already have felt some of the sobriety of this day and of the past months, both for our family and for another family halfway around the world.  More to come on that.  For now… as we move forward, we ask that you join us in prayer for little Miss D, for her birth family, and for all of us as we enter yet another stage of the wait.