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I hate unfinished things. I think I might have mentioned that before. It’s this weird feeling I have, like things aren’t real until they are actually complete.
I can’t get excited about going to Disneyland until I am standing in the park. I can’t believe I am going on an international adventure until the plane lands in another country. That’s just how I am about pretty much everything. This drives Luke CRAZY. He is excited about the thought of any of these things!
With the adoption process, I have struggled THE. ENTIRE. TIME. It was difficult for me to even tell people about what we were doing at times because it hadn’t happened yet. I didn’t want to get excited and I didn’t want others to get excited, until and unless it was really happening.
Once we decided to get started and picked Koinonia we emailed the Resource Parent Coordinator. She is the sweetest and most helpful woman you could meet. We received a response from her right away. She let us know that the next orientation meeting was a couple days away. Perfect timing. I was so excited! No waiting was the best part.
The orientation was exhilarating. We were FINALLY starting, actually doing something to fulfill this calling I’d felt for so long. Don’t get me wrong. It was a lot scary, very informative and made the whole process seem so much more real.
In the meeting, they gave us tons of information on the process, told us the different avenues we could take and answered so many of our questions. It was a great meeting. We were raring to go afterward and couldn’t wait for the next step.
That step was to fill out the application. Easy enough, right? This application was intense. We needed references, information about family, normal application stuff, and it was 17 pages long! After turning in the application, we were told our next step was to take three classes. Two out of the three classes were four hours long and focused on learning about foster/adopted children. The other class was eight hours long and focused on how to parent. The classes are given once a quarter and they happened to be the following three weeks.
I was so excited to have the timeline falling so perfectly into place, but this is a story about God’s plan, waiting on Him and of course adoption. NONE of the classes would work with Luke’s work schedule. So we tried to go to the Koinonia branch in Bakersfield for those classes and they didn’t work either. That was such a testament to the Lord’s timing. Luke’s boss has been so incredibly flexible and helpful through this process.
I was so angry, frustrated, and just really, really down that we wouldn’t begin these classes right away. It didn’t fit with the timeline I had in my head, and I hated feeling the pause button being pressed again.
But deep down I felt peace, and knew this was God’s way of setting the timing just right to make His plan for us spring into action. It is so funny how we can feel so many emotions at once and still know and believe that God’s plan is working in our lives.
My word of advice to myself and anyone else who might need it: trust His plan more than you trust those ever-changing, flimsy feelings.
Find out more of the story in Part 5.
Previously published on bacallburns.com. Used with permission.