Um, never mind....

Sigh.

This post is hard to write, especially after telling you all in my previous post that we were moving forward with the adoption. Well, now it's on hold again.

We had a heart-to-heart with our Social Worker last Thursday. The long & short of it is that we need to wait until December to really move forward. There are several reason for this, but mostly it's because David is in school right now and not making much money. Our situation doesn't look great on paper -- even though last year we made a 6-figure combined income, and once he's out of school next year we'll be rollin' in the money (well, not really, but at least we'll have two salaries again.) The other reason is because we want to adopt an older child (over 2 years old), once we get the homestudy done the adoption could move very fast. While some people are waiting over a year for an infant, we could be matched with a child in six months or less. It really would not be a good thing if we got a child while David's still in school. So it's safer if we wait until December to make sure we don't get a child before next summer.

To be honest, I'm relieved. The whole reason we were trying to get started because we're, well, on the "older" end of the acceptable adoptive parent spectrum. It was my understanding that because of David's age, we had to move as fast as possible before we "aged out" of the system. However, we found out last week that Ethiopia really only looks at the adoptive mother's age. Whew! You'd think I would have known this already, after all of the reading and studying I've done, but Wide Horizons was very vague about it and I felt like everything I read said something different. So it was a relief to get the official word from Wide Horizons (thanks to a call to them from our social worker), that we'll be fine if we wait six months or even a year. (On a side note, the person at Wide Horizons told our social worker that she was working with a 70 year old woman who is trying to adopt! Can you imagine?!)

Having an extra six months will also give us a chance to pay off some debt, which will make us "look better on paper." And by then David will have a better idea of his career opportunities after graduation.

Anyway, the only risk in waiting is that international adoption is a moving target. Things could change in Ethiopia at any time. They could decide to change the age cut-off or decide to tighten the adoption requirements (like China), or the whole program could shut down for some reason (like Guatemala). So that worries me a bit, but this whole thing is a lesson in Trusting God. Not something I'm very good at.

Basically my whole life has been about WAITING -- so I don't know why this would be any different. Maybe God is continuing to teach me patience. Maybe I just haven't gotten it yet.

During my 3-mile walk yesterday I listened to a sermon by Tim Keller titled "The Timing of Jesus." It was a good reminder that our timing is not God's timing, and usually when we're forced to wait that means God's up to something that we don't understand and can't yet see. But that we have to believe in his goodness.

Hmmm, I think I'm going to listen to that sermon every day for the next six months....