Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious tome are your thoughts, God. How vast is the sum of them. Psalm 139; 16, 17 (NIV)

I want to start by saying this is my personal journey of adopting a very special little girl who is now a beautiful young lady. I use “we” and “I” intermittently as the journey is one that I have shared with my husband and sons.

I met our daughter at an orphanage in Taiwan 27 years ago. This February (2019) my daughter (I will refer to her as Chi, her Chinese name), my husband, and I will be traveling back to her native Taiwan and we will meet her birth mother. For the past 10 years we have been considering a trip to her homeland and to the orphanage where she spent the first few months of her life. Now, what was only a dream, has become a reality. Lots of mixed emotions have been stirred up in her and in us. All those questions and realities of attachment, rejection, abandonment, and a heart’s longing have bubbled up to the surface. Navigating through these myriad of emotions has caused each of us to grapple and grow in in unexpected ways.

The Beginning

Before Chi joined our family, we were six… four wonderful biological boys, who were born very close together, my husband and me. Our youngest son was born when our oldest was five. I was worn out. So after the birth of our youngest via C-section when the doctor offered “a permanent solution”, we said yes! Hindsight says we should have waited to make that decision. Still the decision was made and we considered ourselves blessed with four healthy boys.

Almost immediately I had an unsettling feeling that we had made a mistake and our family was incomplete. I prayed about it and I wrestled with it for quite some time. I had dreams about our family that included five boys and a little girl. I loved my boys very much, but did not have peace about our family being complete.

We tried many avenues to adopt. Even though we put our names in for older children, special needs children, sibling groups, and were open to adopting either gender, it did not seem to matter. We considered other races. Still we were rejected over and over because we already had children. After six long years of unfulfilled desire and longing, I finally poured out my heart to God and prayed for peace in my heart. I told God that I knew there was a little girl out there that needed a momma and I asked God to find that momma for her. I prayed that He would watch over her until she could be with her momma. I was so tired of longing that I remember my prayers as if I had spoken them yesterday.

I don’t remember the exact day I prayed that prayer, but I know it was in the spring. I finally let go of my deepest desire and turned it over to God. I was able to accept what God intended for us rather than cling to my own human desires. The funny thing is, when I did this, I finally had inner peace and was satisfied with the family God had already given us. And then one day, “out of the blue”…

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