The Waiting

We were hav­ing lunch at Applebee’s last week when I heard Tom Petty singing that “the wait­ing is the hard­est part.”

“Hey,” I said to Carla, “I think he’s singing to us!”

We’d been through the heart­break of learn­ing we might not be able to adopt from China any­more. We’d expe­ri­enced the bizarre ela­tion when there seemed to be a glim­mer of hope. Up until a few days pre­vi­ous to this, The Wait­ing is exactly where we’d been:

Wait­ing to hear back from our adop­tion agency as to how we should proceed.

Wait­ing for some kind of divine rev­e­la­tion to tell us either yes — that by some super­nat­ural mir­a­cle, we’d be able to con­tinue onward in our pur­suit of a Chi­nese daugh­ter — or no.

We’d both often held to the idea that God was always call­ing us to the thing that seemed most impos­si­ble to us, because the seem­ing impos­si­bil­ity proved His good­ness and power all the more. The whole “He who is able to do immea­sur­ably more than all we ask or imag­ine” bit. We had hoped that divine rev­e­la­tion would be deliv­ered through the word of our adop­tion agency.

We were sup­posed to hear back from them by Jan­u­ary 19th. The 19th came and went. The week­end came and went. Mon­day came, and we were both pretty ner­vous. At Carla’s request, I emailed the agency to say “uhh…were we sup­posed to hear from you?” We finally got our answer the next day.

Since they had already told us that some of our “issues” might cause prob­lems with China’s new reg­u­la­tions, they had con­sid­ered us “on hold,” and waited to hear from us as to how we’d pro­ceed. After read­ing an email update from the agency a few weeks prior, where they had said “all prospec­tive China adop­tive par­ents will be con­tacted,” we had con­sid­ered our­selves on hold, wait­ing to hear from them as to how we should pro­ceed. Ah, glo­ri­ous miscommunication.

After clear­ing that up, they gave the word we’d been look­ing for. “We wouldn’t rec­om­mend it.”

Not “yes.” Not “no.”

The ball was once again in our court. Two peo­ple who can spend hours at Movie Gallery ago­niz­ing over what to rent were being asked to make a life-altering deci­sion, and soon.

We knew it wasn’t going to be pos­si­ble to just make some space in our nor­mal sched­ule for this kind of thing, so we both requested a day off from work. A day to pray, write, talk, what­ever. We ended up stay­ing home last Thurs­day, fast­ing until a deci­sion was made. We both came to the same con­clu­sion — as much as it broke our hearts to admit it, our win­dow to China was clos­ing faster than we’d be able to get through it. We would have to find another country.

Weeks ear­lier, when we were first con­fronted with the pos­si­bil­ity that China was out, a set of seem­ingly coin­ci­den­tal events had brought Ethiopia to Carla’s mind. We didn’t even know it was one of our agency’s coun­tries. As it turns out, it’s their only other coun­try that we’d be able to adopt from, since every other of their coun­tries has sim­i­lar restric­tions to the ones bar­ring us from China. There are a few other rea­sons (which I don’t have the time or space to get into now) that this makes total sense, both log­i­cally and in a deep-down, spir­i­tual way.

That Thurs­day after­noon, we called Amer­ica World to tell them we’d like to switch to the Ethiopia pro­gram. The intake spe­cial­ist said she’d for­ward our infor­ma­tion on to that group and we should hear from some­one that afternoon.

Which brings us back to the begin­ning, break­ing our fast at Applebee’s and hear­ing an eerily prophetic Tom Petty song.

We’re in The Wait­ing yet again — we haven’t heard any­thing since that after­noon. But, like Petty, we won’t let it get to us.

We’ll take it on faith, we’ll take it to heart.

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