Waiting

I have become a professional waiter. Not the restaurant type either..... Rather, I have become accustomed to waiting. And yet...I lack patience. Is this possible?

We wait on all kinds of things. We wait in line. We wait for dinner. We wait on our hopelessly dawdling toddler... And on good days, I don't mind a wait. So long as I am not in a hurry to get somewhere, I can usually occupy my mind, I can multi-task, and I can socialize the time away. I am not particularly fond of the delays but I can tolerate them.

I am in the throws of my (what seems like millionth) adoption attempt. And I have told myself that I can do this. I can wait some more. I set out on this journey knowing that the end result would be months away. I reasoned that time would fly and in the mean time I could keep myself occupied with things like.....thinking up new names....and decorating a nursery....and scrap booking my first daughter's baby album. (She is after all five...and I should get around to it before another baby comes along.)

Each time I have started an adoption, I have been content to wait. But this time it is different. I have been waiting now only five months. And...should you ever adopt...you should know that is like blinking in the adoption world. But I am teetering on the verge of losing it. I am just getting the beginning of the really hard wait and everyday I become more and more anxious.

Waiting is easy...if you are sure of the outcome....

Each time we have started an adoption, I was perfectly content to wait. I was in no hurry. And I think I have discovered the reason why. I think it was because I knew the outcome. (Or at least I thought I knew). I knew that if I waited long enough, there would be a sweet little bundle in my arms making the wait all worth while. But that has not happened. And I am just left wondering... If am being called to do this, how can I keep ending up with empty arms?

And more than once? And it leaves me to wonder....have I really been called to do this?

The loss that comes each time is staggering. It douses my soul in cold water and it takes every ounce of my strength to just to pull my hope back through the ice that forms around my heart. I want to give up and just pursue pregnancy.

It doesn't help when all of your friends keep asking "So why don't you just have your own children?" "Why don't you just get pregnant?" And it definitely doesn't help when you over hear a pregnant mother of five grumbling about having another mouth to feed. All I can think is "well if you don't want this baby....I'll take her!" And it just makes my heart ache to know that there are over 150 million orphans in the world, and I seem to be impotent to bring a single child home.

I could keep going if I could just be sure that I heard God right. I could keep waiting if I knew that this is what He had planned for me. It would be so much easier to just run to the nearest fertility clinic and have a do-it-yourself baby. But I sat in that office some many years ago with no desire to go forward. I didn't even want to try. I just knew that I wanted to adopt. And my husband didn't want to try. He too felt the calling of adoption.

And here we are.....stopped in our tracks. Not once. Not even twice...but if you count all the wild goose chases we have been on in the last few years it would amount to at least three official failed adoption attempts and really more like six or seven severe disappointments.

And so here we are again.....waiting. And now....for the first time...even though I have been promised that this time it will happen, I have no hope. At least, I have no hope that I can muster. (There must be some hope...or I wouldn't have filled out ALL THAT PAPERWORK for the zillionth time). But I don't feel any hope.

I sit back and quietly watch the waiting board everyday. I watch the emails from our adoption agency's forum. I see all these bleary eyed, blissful mommies-to-be....and I feel a hundred miles apart from them. I can't even bring myself to get to know any of them. I am just so convinced that this will never happen.

And I am not alone. Since plunking down the last few thousand dollars five months ago...my husband hasn't even spoken of it again. He refuses to speak about it. He won't choose a name. And converting our guestroom into that nursery is absolutely out of the question. In his mind...there is no baby on the way. And so I wait alone.

I am looking for the lesson in this. I am beginning to think maybe I misheard God. I see all these women in our adoption forum adopting their seventy-fifth child (ok...I am exaggerating a little)....but I seriously begin to wonder......what is up with that God? Some of them have biological children....maybe even five or six (and no...I am not exaggerating this time) and they are adopting sometimes two at a time.......and I am still waiting for one.

Is the lesson that I am not called to adopt? Did I screw up so badly with my first child that I am not supposed to have a second? Am I being punished? Should I take matters more into my own hands and just give into seeking pregnancy?

It's the waiting...with no assurances which are causing my pain....and from all I can tell...the only thing I know for certain is that I have been called to wait.

Perhaps it is not a lesson in patience anymore.....maybe it is a lesson in learning to trust. So I lean not on my own understanding but I will learn to trust in the Lord with all my heart.