I love the word "March"

When you find out you are pregnant you never forget the moment when you saw the pink plus sign.  You remember everything about it...where you bought the test, where you took it, the time of year, how you reacted, how you told your spouse, and on and on.  Adopting has a moment much like that too.  The moment you find out you are going to have a child.  For some, like with Elie, it was seeing her picture on the waiting child list on our computer.  For others it comes from a much awaited phone call.

The word "March" will forever be synonymous in my mind with finding Faith and on a greater scale the month that changed the entire trajectory of my life.  If you are interested, you can read the whole story of that day here.  After 18 months of waiting the call finally came.  The call to tell us there was a little girl for us to consider adopting.  There were lots of unknowns.  She was very sick and she was diagnosed with Spina Bifida.  We were the only ones on the list who had checked yes to this condition.  Our social worker warned us to think hard about our ability to adopt a child with so many unknowns and the possibility of life long complications.  Kevin and I knew before we even looked at her referral that she was our daughter.  And then came the picture....

I wished with all my heart to jump through the computer and grab that little girl and never let her go.  That moment would come but first we had to go through some months of waiting and governmental hoops to jump through.  We, and all of you, know now how the story ends.  Our baby didn't have spina bifida and God quickly healed her of all that was wrong physically in her body.  But that day... the day of the phone call... we didn't know how it was going to end.  We decided to take a step into the unknown.  One small step that would lead in the years to come to even harder ones to take.  Our Faith is a gift to our family.  She is a gift to my own personal faith.  She is a living stone of remembrance that God is Faithful and Able to guide us through all that He has called us to do.

A few months ago I was talking with a friend of mine about Faith.  I told her that I was sure if we hadn't grabbed Faith up that some other family would have the blessing of raising her as their daughter.  Someone else would have gotten her in time.  Another family would have taken her to have surgery before that mass on the top of her head caused her brain to hemorrhage.  My friend stopped my story with this..."You don't know that.  When we are not obedient to what God tells us to do there are consequences and sometimes those consequences can effect other people."   I had never really thought about it that way.  And I guess we will never really know what would have happened to Faith if we had refused that referral.... or if we had never checked yes next to the box for a child with spina bifida.

But one thing I know for sure.  She opened our heart to a world that we had not considered.  She opened our heart to the possibility of adopting children with special needs and paved the way for her sister to come home.  She made us rethink how we live, how we spend, how we do our days.  God used her to forever change our hearts.  I cannot.... I do not... want to imagine our lives without her.  She is a gift.  And for that reason I love the word "March".