March marks our one year anniversary being certified to adopt.
Hmmm. One full year since we were certified. It’s a milestone on this journey I suppose. One that we’ve been thinking on often in the last few weeks.
If you’ve never been down the adoption path you might not know the effort it requires to become certified. It’s quite possibly the most paperwork-intense process you’ve ever seen. I’ve been in the Army so that’s saying a lot. 
There’s an emotional toll as you go through answering tough questions about your past, your present, and your plans for parenting. You have to get references and fingerprints and background checks. A specialist comes to your house to visit and ask questions…twice. And before any of that starts you have to pick out an agency to work with…and how do you know what agency to choose or even that you need an agency until you start doing some research to find out what it all takes? To say the least, it’s a long drawn out process that takes it’s toll.
So you can image that when that paper comes in and you know that you’ve passed muster it’s a great feeling. Ahhh! There’s no longer any barrier. They’ve approved us as being “worthy” to adopt a child as our own. They’ve examined our strengths and weakness and found us to be good enough to be a parent as far as the State is concerned. There’s nothing to stop us now.
Yet that is but the beginning it seems.
Here we are one year later and what’s wrong with this picture? <dramatic pause> We still haven’t adopted a child, that’s what’s wrong. The whole point of getting certified is so that a child can be adopted. Without the child, the certification itself seems pointless.
Here we are one year later, still praying that God would bring us a child (or two) to adopt. Still waiting for a match. You’d think that we’d get tired of waiting and wonder if this really is our true calling…and you’d be right. We do wonder these things; we do get tired and discouraged from time to time. Yet, we hold on to the hope that “God aint done with us yet.”
We’re praying more specifically these days that God would bring us a healthy baby boy by the beginning of May…and even so, that His will be done rather than ours. If we must wait longer, we will. If not a boy so be it. If the child’s body is not whole we’ll still love him or her just as much.
One year later we still have faith (although I wish I could say we don’t grumble about the wait, lol).
JPM
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