When we started making our family, I had no idea we would be on a journey that continues to amaze and challenge us with more children. When I first got married, I didn’t want any kids. I was selfish and insecure. Mostly I liked not being responsible for anyone but me. On our first anniversary my wife informed me she wanted to have children. I curled up in the fetal position and began to cry. How the hell was I going to be a father when I was still a child myself. So my fatherhood began reluctantly. I am not sure when I realized I liked being a father, probably the first time my wife went back to work after the birth of our first. I was studying to be an architect and she was working full time supporting our growing family. Jacob had been asleep for a few hours and to my worst fear he woke before Sydney got home.

Well I picked him up and began to change his diaper my first solo. It went really quickly and thankfully no poop, then while I was lifting him up to put the diaper on him it hit me, like a missile from a multi-million dollar war plane yellow stinky slim all over me. Then to make it worse as I put him in the tub to wash him he threw up all over us both. I called my wife sobbing defeated and humiliated by a two-month-old. Thus was my initiation into parenting, messy helpless and amazingly overjoyed that I survived the assault. Now 20 years later we are adopting our 14th and 15th child. It is amazing what God can do with a reluctant and scared 21 year old.

During the December rendition of the experiential worship gathering I help run in Cincinnati we dealt with waiting. We focused on the story of Simeon and how he waited for Jesus to came. As we created and participated in the Map Room that December evening I was struck that one of the biggest lessons I have learned having made a family of now to be 15 children was that waiting was a good thing. Yet it’s not a waiting of sitting and passively excepting something to happen. It is a waiting filled with activity. A waiting like Simeon’s. One filled with an expectation of a future event but a waiting that gets the job done each day. A waiting that is in tune with the Spirit of the living God in a way that responding to God’s prompting results in action. This quiet December evening it all seemed to converge. God has used the making of our colorful family to teach me I need to wait for him but I must be about doing things to help his will come to fruition.

Adoption is a process of waiting. It is the proverbial hurry up and wait experience. To begin the process you need to complete a home study. You fill out reams of paper work, get interviewed, evaluated and exposed to analysis you would not normally allow. All through this stage of the process you are anxious and nervous about what is to come, a life, a child, a life time of commitment. Once the home study and paper work is finished you wait, wait for your child. Sometimes you wait for months, maybe years and you have absolutely no control. Every time the phone rings you hold your breath.

Then one day it rings and the voice on the other end says they are about to change your life. This thing you’ve been waiting for, your child has been chosen. Joy and exhilaration overwhelm you and you study the picture you have been cherishing for months wondering who they really are. Yet, sometimes the child you have started to fall in love with disappears never to be found and the waiting begins again, except this time it is waiting seasoned with pain. The pain of the child lost the one you never held, the one you never spoke to or touched.

So you wait again, months, days, weeks pass and you wonder if it will ever happen. You may even quit waiting and give up unable to endure the roller coaster of emotion. You stop gasping each time the phone rings, you stop thinking each and every minute about your child. Yet, late at night you wake unable to stop thinking about your daughter who never was. You go about your life working, living, loving enjoying the routine of life because it keeps your mind busy. Then one day you check your email and there is a picture of a child, you open the attachment and read that he is to be your son. Everything you have worried about, everything you doubted, everything you hoped for has been finished.

Then on a rainy November day you watch your wife and your child walk down the airport passageway and you begin to cry, cry uncontrollably. You hug your son and you know that all the waiting all the pain was worth it. A life together has begun a life that will be filled with more waiting, more learning, more pain, more joy. Yet you know that the waiting, a waiting filled with activity, is worth it. You know it each night you tuck your son into bed and you say a prayer for him and for the daughter who never was. Through it all God is creating a tenacity and a strength within you that enables you to endure pain and doubt that would destroy most. Like Simeon who spent his life knowing the Lord was coming but never quit sure he would have the joy of seeing him. Yet through all the years a strength that can only come from the Lord empowers your soul to go on each day. A power that is supernatural and a gift from the living God. The gift of waiting with the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Thank you so much for your article! I love to hear adoption stories. Good luck as you wait for your next children!
--Leah Englund ( missleahcf at hotmail dot com ) on 2/6/2005; 11:02:57 PM