Five Years: Mountains and Miracles

Psalm 30:11-12You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
you have loosed my sackcloth
and clothed me with gladness,
that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent
O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever!

Five years ago we adopted three precious children.  Two daughters and a son.  We had prayed about them long before we ever knew about them.  Our toddlers, ages 3 and 2 at the time, had even given these three children fictitious names with which they would use to pray for them and jabber about them.  We loved them and longed for them to be home with the fierce longing of parents.  

We met them for the first time on November 24, 2008.  Nothing could have ever prepared us for that meeting...no book, no training, no expert, no therapist or psychologist.  Sometimes there are seasons of life where God wipes out all opportunities for self-reliance and teaches us how sweet it is to trust in Him, to depend wholly on Him.  There was no honeymoon period for this particular adoption.  It was trial by fire from the get-go and it was our first sibling adoption, as well as our first adoption of older children, as well as our first adoption out of age-order.  Nothing like choosing to walk into a triple-whammy to set us up for an epic fail and epic heartbreak.

Yes, we failed in adoption.  We had hoped to be this child's forever family and we could not fulfill our promise.  We welcomed home three precious children who were not at all what the referral paperwork and Colombian social workers had prepared us for.  Their hurt was greater than we could have ever imagined and we struggled to recover from our surprise.  Very simply, we had just adopted three children who had no idea what it meant to live in a functional family and who daily lived out the trauma of past hurts.  They were three children who each individually needed the attention of a full-time parent, but there was only one of me each day and there were two other, smaller toddlers, who also needed safety, security, and consistency.  My heart broke daily as I could not care for everyone adequately.

In our weakness and brokenness, shock and pain, confusion and desperation, God provided another family to love our new son.  By this time he was six.  Yes, only six.  He had already spent several months in a residential treatment center.  The residential treatment center was scheduled to close in a few months and we were unprepared to bring him home as the other children still needed all of me daily.  The county had not been able to help us even after spending much of that year attending medical, psychological, and psychiatric appointments seeking a diagnosis that would garner services.  We had no idea what to do.  We prayed desperately for a thoroughly Christian family who had no younger children at home and who had previous experience parenting children from hard places to care for him.  In searching for a family to care for our son, our adoption agency said this would be impossible.  My heart broke as I understood a small part of the pain that birth parents face in choosing to place their child for adoption.  We were choosing to place our son, our adopted son, for adoption. 

God answered our prayers with a family who was everything our son needed.  They were Christians, seeking to live for Christ daily.  They had no younger children.  And they had  experience.  Lots of experience.  They also had several older sons living at home who were an incredible help in our son's transition and growth.  Though they had never considered adopting internationally, they were the perfect family for our son, and our only comfort in our own failure at parenting him was that we were the conduit to getting him to the home where he could truly thrive. 

For an intensely long, dark, and painful season it felt like we might never emerge from this profound grief and loss, compounded by shame and a deep sense of failure.  There is incredible shame in the adoption community as well as in the world outside of adoption that views adoption disruption as a terrible evil committed by unloving and uncommitted parents.  It was a shame and a burden we wore and carried with us daily.  We loved our son deeply and grieved at our inability to fulfill our covenant promises to care for all of our children.  We prayed intensely for options to parent him and keep everyone else safe physically and emotionally and the option God provided came by the way of another family.  It was not the way we had dreamed it would be when we had hoped and prayed for this child.

And then again, adoption disruption was not the end.

Five years after adopting these three children our son has now been in his new family for four years.  After a significant time of allowing him to bond with his new family, we reconnected with his family and have been blessed to witness much healing in his life.  He is every bit their son and they are his parents and we have the sweet opportunity to be a regular and active part of his life.  His parents have become some of our greatest encouragers, mentors, and friends.  Their children are some of our children's closest friends.

This experience of failure, brokenness, and desperation was not entirely a loss, either for us or for our son. Our son has a wonderful family for which we are so thankful and we have experienced God's grace and goodness in ways we never knew.  This experience taught us so much about compassion, dependence on God, the value of friendship, a right view of suffering and God's sovereignty, how to reach out to families facing similar crises, and even a bit about parenting kids who have been hurt.  If it were not for losing our son, we never would have reached out and eventually adopted our two oldest children.  While I am sure many thought we were crazy to dive into older child, sibling, out of order adoption again, God clearly had ordered our past experiences to prepare us for these amazing teenagers.  

I never imagined God would build our family this way, through loss and grief, suffering and pain.  And then again, it is the exact way He has built His family of believers, through the loss and grief, suffering and pain. He sacrificed His only Son so that we might be born again to a living hope through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, thereby becoming His children.

I rarely write about adoption disruption.  It is the dark secret in the closet of adoption, but it is not without hope and healing.  Through disruption we have witnessed God move mountains of past hurts and we have seen Him do miracles of healing in the lives of these three precious children.  God has turned for me my mourning into dancing and clothed me with gladness.  While I don't talk about it often, I simply cannot be silent.  I will give thanks to Him forever for these mountains moved and miracles witnessed!

 

2008 in Colombia

2013