Our calling to Ben

I've been wanting to write this for a while now and finally am. How did we go from our thinking God was calling us to adopt a Chinese baby girl to adopting a 3-year-old Chinese boy? Well, I pasted what I wrote about our calling to China below. We hadn't wanted to go to China but God made it very clear our child was in China. When we talked about whether it was a girl or boy, we decided it must be a girl, because the Chinese don't give boys away, unless they have special needs. We weren't sure we were ready for a special needs child or an older child, as first-time parents, and we didn't feel any leading from God, except that we felt bad that many girls are given away just because they are girls. So we decided it must be a baby girl.

What we didn't know is that God didn't want to reveal His plan yet to us...apparently so that we would find our son, Ben. We waited and waited and when we heard that the wait might possibly go until between 2009 and 2012, we started asking God if He really meant for us to wait that long. However, God made Sarah wait a VERY long time, so we didn't want to sidestep His will just because we were getting impatient. So we started praying really hard and asking others to pray...days of praying and praying.

During that time, God brought to mind many things that only supported looking into adopting a child with special needs...Jesus said when you have a feast, don't invite those who can pay you back but instead invite the blind, lame, crippled...Jesus also said "'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' Then the righteous will answer Him, "Lord, when did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?" The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine you did for me.'"

And I thought about how the purpose of our adopting was to adopt a child who needed a home, who didn't have a line of people waiting to adopt her/him. After all, we are able to have our own children, but decided not to. God had called us to adopt a child in need.

After days of praying, we both felt really at peace about looking into adopting a child with minor needs...more peace than I had ever felt about the adoption, actually, which meant we were further down the path to find the child God meant for us.

I must insert here that at least a few weeks before this, I had been looking at Bethany's lists of hard to place children, came across a description of a 3-year-old boy and started crying. All the descriptions were sad and I could see how all of the children were hard to place...their needs were intimidating, emotionally-demanding, required a lot of time, and were sometimes expensive...a lot of the children were much older. But when I read the vague description of a boy in "Asia" with the need he had, I started crying because the little boy didn't ask to be born that way...the name of his problem sounded pretty bad and I wondered who would ever adopt him. There was no picture. At that time, still thinking we were probably waiting for a baby girl and not knowing what country in "Asia" he was from, I put the thought aside.

Fast forward: After deciding to look at children with needs, we were sent a list of children. This was very hard...there were pictures...I wanted to adopt them all. One little 3-year-old boy on the list again had me in tears. We analyzed the reports of the info., discussed which children we'd be comfortable with while praying, talked to a doctor about the problems, etc. One day, while looking at the info. again for the boy on the list who made me cry, I suddenly remembered crying at the vague description on Bethany's site. They had the same physical problem, were both three..could this be the same boy? I called the contact person listed for the boy on the site, got a woman in the Michigan office, and she confirmed that yes, it was the same boy. This seemed like a sign but I wanted to be sure it wasn't just my emotions. After another tense couple of days of intense praying, we narrowed it down to our son and a baby girl with a heart problem, in case God still wanted us to adopt a baby girl...we just weren't sure yet. We chose the two we were drawn to and left it up to God. However, by the morning that Bethany was supposed to call us with the news, I knew it was going to be the little boy, our son...I just knew that he was ours. And sure enough, we were matched with Ben.

Ben will need at least a couple of surgeries, but after that, he will be fine. And now, we are still waiting for the final letter to sign for him, the LOA letter. We hope to travel no later than October. It hurts to know that a vague description with a generic blue outline of a boy listed him on Bethany's site, because he's so special to us...that was our son!