This side of the wait has a whole new set of emotional challenges. I'm often asked if the wait is harder now that we've seen Isaac's face. The truth of it is... it's just a different kind of hard! I haven't forgotten the heart-wrenching struggle of waiting three years for THE call, it's still really fresh in my mind! In respect of the families that are still waiting for their call, it would simply be foolish of me to downplay that side of the wait! Before we received our referral, I honestly thought that if I could just know WHO in the heck I was praying for every day, that my heart would be at peace. I mean, I knew I was praying for our son, but if I'm being real, I felt like I was praying for an imaginary child! So the moment we saw Isaac's precious face my soul took a deep sigh of relief... he is REAL, he has a FACE... that longing, unknown, part of the wait was instantly over! Praise the LORD! But now... now, I have this absolutely beautiful, lushes lips, adorable, squishy faced child, that I KNOW is our son, and the wait continues! We just shifted from one heart wrenching side of the wait to another. I will say however, that the one thing that is for sure more challenging now that we've seen his face is the urgency I feel in my heart to get to him! The fact that every day he is growing and changing, and that I'm missing it, is heavy on my chest and makes me want to jump on a plane TODAY and go scoop him up! This anxious feeling that stirs inside of me to hold my son, brings me to a place that I know the Lord desires for me to be... on my knees. When I feel like things are out of my control (like super frustrating government paper work on this side of the wait) I am continually reminded of the importance of prayer! In my bible study last week (Priscilla Shirer's Gideon study-totally recommend it by the way!) it was talking about how God exists and is not only able but WILLING to intervene in our lives in a personal, miraculous way if we would simply let our requests be known to God. She asks the question: "Are there any areas of you life that you no longer talk to God about because you feel like "that's just the way things are"? If so, what areas are they?" For me, it's easy to look at the government paperwork we are waiting on, as being "just the way things are". For some reason my tendency is to feel like if I can't personally change the situation or come up with the solution- than it's out of my control. BUT God suggests differently!
So while the paperwork is out of my hands and into the hands of embassy workers half way across the world, I refuse to assume that "it's just the way things are"... and so I am boldly praying for God's divine intervention! I am praying that Isaac's case gets shuffled to the top of the stack of cases and lands in the hands of an efficient and productive embassy worker! I pray for additional embassy employees to be assigned so that the Adoption Unit could have help in working through the backlog of cases. I pray that as the embassy does it's investigation over Isaac's case that everything would unfold smoothly. I pray that this PAIR letter, that we are waiting on in order to receive our preliminary court date, is issued in record time!
And so I take a deep breath today, as we wait on things that appear to be "just the way they are", and instead, I invite God to move mountains, and stacks of papers, and make a miraculous way for our case to be issued this important PAIR letter.
