I'm Just a Pawn...

This week, I received an email from a long ago brief acquaintance.  This man had come from the US to Delhi to adopt his daughter.  He was here for weeks on end trying to get it finished.  His wife was at home giving birth to their third child, another girl.  He came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner.  This was all three years ago. 

His wife wrote this week telling me she had just had their fifth child, and he was scheduled to come back to India next month to pick up their sixth, an Indian boy.  She wanted recommendations on where he could stay this time. 

I admit, I was shocked to hear they had five kids, and were adopting from India, and a boy at that.  This is the second family I’ve heard of in the last month who is adopting from India.  Both are using the same agency.  An agency I’d never heard of.

This has thrown me for a mental loop.  I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around it.  I spent two years researching adoption from India. I looked at the CARA list of approved agencies to work in India so.many.times.  I googled, inquired, looked at agency reviews.  I NEVER saw the name of this agency anywhere.  I don’t remember ever hearing about them until last month.  On top of that, everyone we ever talked to said “Don’t adopt out of Delhi. It takes forever.”  This agency works with an orphanage in Delhi.  Everything I heard is contradicted in this one agency. 

I could NOT figure out how I never ran across it before.  How every thing seemed to lead to a closed door, and if I’d just heard of this place or seen it online, how different things might be right now.  

And, WHY did I listen to an agency that told us we shouldn’t adopt from India when I had a really bad opinion of them based on our communication, and felt like they didn’t know what they were doing?  Why did I believe them, listen to their advice, and change the course of our life based on it?  Why?

And then I realized the only way this could have happened is that God went to great lengths to keep me from finding it.  He took incredible measures to turn our eyes away from India and point them to Ethiopia.

Confession: I have felt for the last few months that we’re adopting from Ethiopia because we could not adopt from India.  By default.  

Yesterday, I realized that it is NOT by default.  It is totally by His Design.  How else can these last six months be explained?  I cannot come up with another conclusion.

And it’s very surreal to look back at the last six months and all the decisions I’ve felt like we made and realize that we really didn’t have a thing to do with it, we were just following the path that was already marked out for us to get to Ethiopia.  And it gives me such an indescribable peace and trust in seeing that God has aimed this arrow so intentionally in this direction, and at a specific child...  who is in Ethiopia... not India...  tears...

“Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”  Proverbs 19:21