One Year Later

One year ago Garrett and I sat in our living room and had a conversation that started us on a journey we knew nothing about. One whole year ago we googled how to adopt in Georgia. A year ago I texted my friend Chelsea a screenshot of her own contact information at the top of the search page. A year ago we scheduled a time to talk through what domestic infant adoption looks like. 

I was cuddled under a blanket on my front porch in the cold on the phone with Chelsea. For those of you who don't know, Chelsea is a trusted friend of mine from college who is also the Executive

Director of Nightlight Christian Adoptions Athens office. I knew I could trust her to give us all the information and wisdom we needed to figure out how adoption works and if we could really do it. I took lots of notes and asked a lot of questions through our conversation and realized how little I knew about what this process would look like. She told us to research agencies and pray and invited us to ask her more questions when we thought of them. 

After about 24 hours of prayer, crunching numbers, and online searches we filled out our application and officially started with Nightlight Christian Adoptions. It wasn't long before we checking things off of our giant to-do list. We were sure we could muscle through the paperwork and fly up the waiting list to a match in no time. We were optimistic that we would have a match by the end of 2019. We thought we knew a lot about things. 🙈

One Year Later

Now it's 2020. It's been a year and we don't have a match. We powered through our paperwork and were match ready by the end of March. That makes this January is our 10th month waiting. Soon we will have to start updating our home study. That means more paperwork that we were hoping we wouldn't have to revisit. At this point, we know this process inside out and upside down. It's amazing how much we've learned about the adoption world in the past year. 

Since becoming match ready, the profile book and video we put together have been shown to a lot of expectant mothers. There are have been situations we were really excited about potentially working out and other situations where we have had to say no to before they could become a possibility. We've made expectant mom's final two choices a few times now. We get so close, but quite matched. As of now we are number 28 on the waiting list which is a huge jump from where we started with who knows how long left to go. 

It's frustrating that our plans haven't worked out the way we thought they should. Through it all, though, our prayer has stayed the same: that the right one would confidently choose us to parent her child as our own. So even though we hoped and wished and prayed that we would already have a match by now, we know that we are in the center of God's kindness just where we are. Our match hasn't come. We haven't missed it. It will come at just the right time from the right person. Until then we will continue to wait as well as we can remembering that God is kind.