How Does One Choose a Child?

We didn’t know the answer.

Staring at sweet faces, perusing profiles for birth stats and medical info, trying to make sense of it all... orphans... left behind because of their disabilities. Which one was meant to be my child? I stressed, I cried, I prayed for peace.

In February, I found Arina from Russia. In all my visits to RR I had never seen her before and something about her struck me. I wondered if I had found my baby. I googled her name. It is Greek and means “peace”.

Our family agreed that she was meant to be ours and we initiated the adoption process. I’ll skip the parts about the placement agency stringing us along for ten weeks... Finally another placement agency delivered the news that Arina was no longer available. We will never know why. A hard and tear-filled weekend followed.

I thought about our selection process... about why I was even trying to choose a child... about why we were adopting... I was looking for an augury... pictures, birthdays, names... divine guidance of a sort. I was looking for the perfect child for us. How typical of me to want to do God’s work my way.

On the following Monday, Andrea contacted us about Peach. While my husband and I were talking it over, she emailed about Mallory. We weren’t looking at three year olds. We weren’t looking for an infant with a life-threatening heart defect. We weren’t looking for two children.

But then again, when I was pregnant with our babies, we weren’t “looking” for any specific child. We were ready and willing to take the children God sent to us. We talked about this, together realizing that we were not able to know how to choose a child and so we trusted that God had chosen for us (um, no, I’m not saying Andrea is God, though she sure is his hands and feet.)

Once we decided to take them, I was overwhelmed with love for them and my husband was filled with hope for them. With love and hope came peace, and so my prayer was answered after all.