No Mountain We Won't Climb Up
It's hard to believe we have passed the one year mark in our pursuit of Katie. When this journey began, I thought the hardest part was wrestling with my decision to adopt her. Don't get me wrong, that was a very important and very big part (and perhaps the most important), but little did I know what challenges were ahead of me.
I was ill prepared for the emotional roller coaster of the adoption process. We had sort of walked into this process backwards. We didn't discuss adoption for our family, do the research and decide it was right for us, begin the process and wait (or search) for the right child. We had Katie's picture in our hand, our minds were made up and committed to Katie, but the long, arduous process of being approved to adopt had just begun. As we sat down for our first meeting with our agency contact we were given a lot of information, including an 80 page handbook on adopting from China, and an estimated timeline for the process. The timeline showed that the average process takes 10-15 months. This is where it hit me...my month long spiritual battle over whether to adopt Katie was just the first step, and I was standing at the bottom of the mountain getting ready to climb.
The next few months were filled with paperwork, assignments, paperwork, interviews, notarized paperwork, health physicals and FBI fingerprints, paperwork....you get the point. And anyone who has adopted knows the struggle. There were emotional highs when things were plugging along, excitement as we converted our guest room/laundry room into Katie's room, and emotional lows when paperwork was rejected to be completed again or we experienced delays due to entering the Thanksgiving/Christmas holiday season. But there was hope, if we kept moving at this pace, we began to see the possibility of getting to China by Spring 2020. Katie's "birthday" is May 5th so our hearts desire was to have her home to celebrate her birthday.
About this times a very popular contemporary Christian song was released by Cory Asbury called Reckless Love. That song is what I named this blog after and it was my mantra during this time period. Here is a portion of the lyrics that clearly indicates how we felt during this time:
Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God
Of course we all know how the beginning of 2020 played out. And just as one delay after another began in November with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then the Chinese New Year, we experienced on-going delays at the onset of the coronavirus. All our timelines for each step stretched out to the maximum time for the step we were on, and countless other let downs occurred, the most difficult being the movement of Katie back to her home orphanage.
You see, thanks to a generous Christian woman in China, Katie had been moved from her small orphanage in southern China to Beijing about a year earlier to receive weekly therapy for her cerebral palsy at a Christian ministry organization known as Shepherd's Field. While Katie was in the care of this woman, we received photo and video updates of her progress about once a month. For reasons unknown to us, in early January 2020, Katie was sent back to her orphanage and no longer had contact with this caretaker. As the world transformed before all of our eyes and life began to unravel as we know it, we completely lost any contact with Katie. It would be June before I was able to find a way to connect with her again.
This was one of the last pictures we received of Katie, taken sometime in December 2019.
As everything shutdown and we finished school online at home with the girls, we were all distracted for the time being. But once school ended in early June, and every bit of our timeline to bring Katie home was obliterated, the real struggle emotionally and spiritually began. I'll save those thoughts for next time. But before I finish, many have asked how to pray for us, and I wanted to share something specific to pray for. Several articles of our approval paperwork for the adoption begin to expire in February 2021. Our prayer is to be able to travel to China and back to bring Katie home well before these expiration dates would become a problem. In Dan's words, "all I want for Christmas is to bring Katie home"!
Please join us in fervently asking God to make a way for us to go to China. I was directed to Joshua, Chapter 3 (the story of the Israelites crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land) a week ago as I was praying. Read verses 14-17, and pray with me that the Lord of the whole earth will stand his ground in the middle of these once deep waters until we pass by and cross safely to bring His child home. After all, there is no shadow, mountain, wall, virus, or body of water that will hold the reckless pursuit of His love back or thwart His plans and purposes.
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