New Direction

It's been a very, very long time since I have updated our blog.  Allison is flying home right now from her summer doing mission work in Chang Klang, and Max is preparing, very happily, to begin kindergarten and our family just completed the home study for our second adoption!  

Getting to this point hasn't been fast or without bumps in the road.  I have called WACAP several times over the past year to find out the status of the Thai adoption system and wasn't encouraged to even try.  Finally our SW told me we should just go to China.

I have to be honest, China was not in my heart...at all...okay well maybe a little because there are orphans there.  But I don't really like following crowds, I don't want to do what everyone else has done...I really have no idea why, but I resisted China.  

Last fall we started to talk seriously about whether or not God was leading us to adopt a little brother for Max.  We contacted WACAP officially a couple times and didn't really get a response.  I was fine with that, because I wasn't really sure.  We carried on with life and the desire to adopt came and went.

The week after Christmas our family went to Gulf Shores with my sister's family and my parents.  My parents paid for a week in a large house on the beach. It was amazingly fun, but my mom was sick almost the whole time we were there.  She tried to participate but spent most of the week laying down.  My nephew ended up in the hospital the day after we arrived and had a ruptured appendix. He stayed in the hospital the ENTIRE time we were there.  So the dream vacation was a little less than ideal!  During this crazy week the director of the waiting children department at WACAP emailed us and apologized and said we had some how fallen through the cracks but she would send us some profiles and we could begin to look.

I wasn't sure. I wanted to, but nothing felt right.  I had no peace.  We left to return to GA and the next day my parents left and the following day my sister's family went home.  My mom was still sick so she went to the week-end clinic as soon as they got home and she was diagnosed with allergic hepatitis.  The doctor said it was a reaction to an antibiotic she had never taken and should never take again. She was told to go to her GP on Monday to follow up, which she did.  He quickly ordered a sonogram to be sure there was no damage to the liver and in two day she had a sonogram and CAT scan.  The next morning, a Wednesday, she went back to the doctor and was told she had cancer in her liver and based on the symptoms it was most likely bile duct cancer, a really bad cancer with a really bad name.  It's rare, about 3,000-5,000 a year are diagnosed in the US and all but about 5% have risk factors like having had hepatitis or alcohol abuse or something.  My mom falls in the 5% or less, she had NO risk factors.  The cancer is aggressive and there is no cure. The cancer might respond for a while but then, for no reason, it will stop responding.  It's like the evil twin of pancreatic cancer, or at least to me it is.  The good news is that the antibiotic caused an issue that brought attention to the liver which allowed the doctors to find the cancer.  Most people with bile duct cancer don't find it until they are about to die.  She's been going for 6 months now and is responding to the treatements.

I cannot express the pain and fear that is experienced with a family member is diagnosed with terminal cancer, probably with anything terminal.  She's too young to die, we just buried her mom 3 years ago...I think...it hasn't been very long.  My grandmother lived into in 90s.  This isn't supposed to happen.  But it has and it's where we are and all thoughts of adoption went to the back of my mind.  My thinking was that God had slowed us down because we were going to be walking through a very, very difficult time and being in the middle of an adoption would add to the stress.

Throughout the spring she had several surgeries biopsies and had stints put in, so she would stop being yellow, and started her chemo and eventually life fell into a new normal.  In March our WACAP SW emailed and asked how we are doing and if we were still thinking about adopting.  The desire never left and, having been to see my mom, I felt like things were stable for a while and honestly if God gave us this time with my mom perhaps we should bring home her grandson so she could meet him.  Veldon and I prayed and stepped out in faith by asking for some profiles.

We looked through March and into April when we landed on a profile we loved.  He was three in May and beautiful. He has some special needs, but not more than we could deal with.  We were able to save a little money while we got ready to start the home study and in May we had our first visit, buy the end of May we had received pre-approval from China and we were on our way...as long as God provided.

"We will continue this journey as long as God provides" has been our mantra. I mean honestly, we know that God loves the orphan, we know that God calls us to be involved with orphans and we wanted to bring another child home.  But how do we know if it's God's will for our family? We wouldn't, I think, maybe there are other ways to know, but for us this made sense, it's very tangible.    If God didn't provide financially then that would be our answer.  We don't have the means, nearly half our yearly income, to pay for an adoption, but he does!  He can provide for our adoption without strain, without depleting his resources. If we choose to go out to eat with the whole family it might mean that we have to wait a week to buy the paint I want for the living room.  Our life is full of "this for that".  But God's reality isn't. He can do anything. He made this world out of NOTHING, with his BREATH, he SPOKE and there it was, so he absolutely, without a doubt could provide for this adoption. 

Would he provide? Was it his will?  Is his desire to add Chen Hui to our family? Those were the questions we have struggled with all summer.