In 2002 I had three children but wanted more. I felt God leading my husband and I to adopt again. (At this time, my husband did not necessarily feel the same leading but for some reason, God seems to speak to me about adding children to this family before He speaks to my husband:) As I began to pray about this, I found a web site that had pictures of children in my state that were waiting to be adopted. I would look through these photos and pray about the children while my oldest child would stand looking over my shoulder and ask questions. He too was convinced that we should adopt, so he began praying as well.
At the time I was not looking at older children. We thought the best thing for our family was to adopt children that were younger than our children. Our son, however, had different ideas. He told me that he wanted a brother that was his age. I tried to explain the baggage that such a child would have and that we weren't prepared to handle those kind of problems. But our oldest child, whom we taught to pray, began to talk to God and ask for a brother his age. I would hear him praying and just smile because I thought I knew God's answer to that prayer. How wrong I was!!!
God made it very clear to us that we were to adopt not one older child but a sibling group of four older children. The oldest was 10 at the time, his siblings were 9, 5 and 3 (the same age as our youngest at the time). All of them had been in and out of foster care since the oldest was in diapers. They came to us with issues that we hadn't even heard of and sets of luggage not just a bag or two.
This might be a good time to point out that God did a number of small miracles to get these children into our home. The first was providing us with a larger house that had enough bedrooms to house seven children. This particular house sat empty for over a year and six other people that tried to buy it during that time but all the deals fell through for one reason or another. By the time we put an offer in they were so excited to sell it that they accepted our offer even though it was ridiculously low.
The next miraculous things God did was work in my husbands heart for him to be open to adopting four more children. He wasn't keen on having such a large family at first. Then once I saw the kids on that adoption web site we noticed that they were from the same county we were and their social worker was the same worker we had. When I called our social worker, before I had a chance to ask her about the possibility of adopting the four children she asked me, "You wouldn't be interested in adopting a sibling group of four would you? I've got these kids and I think they would fit into your family perfectly."
And in a system that is so slow it took us two years to finalize our first adoption, these four children were having weekend visits at our house within three weeks of this phone call to our social worker and after four weeks of weekend visits they were living with us. Six months later they were officially adopted.
After the adoption was final and the "honeymoon" period wore off we began to see RAD behaviors pop up. As we struggled with these issues and behaviors our oldest came to me complaining about his RADlet siblings. I felt it was my motherly duty to remind him that he had prayed for a brother his age. It made him stop and think.
I have always heard that saying...Be careful what you pray for, 'cause you just might get it. But it has never been illustrated to me so well as when my son prayed for a brother and got one with issues. I think my oldest is at the place now where he understands that God is using this experience to help him grow and be better able to minister to others but it took a long time for him to get there.
So, what are you praying for?!
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