Renewing our strength

It was surely what we needed to have a few days here with little required of us except to eat and to sleep. We slept for almost 12 hours on the train to Kiev and have had good solid nights since then after the intensity of our week out east, so the jetlag of our first week is long past. The first 3 days back were kind of surreal, with a lot of tears, although Friday we woke up with more of a sparkle and benefited from going through all our photos with the kids and comparing our recollections of what happened. Having high speed internet in the apartment has let us stream worship music, and we got to watch a very helpful and timely sermon online this morning. Being alone for the first time since we landed in Ukraine has made it easy to talk and pray and praise any time we want. We have really enjoyed being in the beautiful downtown area and doing a lot of walking.

Yesterday we actually woke up quite cheerful and trusting, and we were encouraged to see the first positive thing since Tuesday morning with the granting of a very favorable appointment time in the last hour or so of work before the holiday weekend. We certainly don't minimize the gravity of what happened with our last referral. Even though it was for only a few days, we honestly felt like these were our children, and at least one of them saw us as parents. There are a lot of other feelings that go along with that, and there were a lot of intimate moments with both of them over the course of 7 days; we have decided that it is not healthful to pretend that it never happened but that we should celebrate and mourn it as something very sweet that did not last long.

We did everything we needed to in order to bond with the children, and it was surely the right thing to do, even though it opened us and them up to a lot of pain. If we had been cautious and not fully opened up our hearts to the children in the last few days, we would be wishing now that we had. The way we see this is that you have to swing hard if you are ever going to hit a home run, and we came very close to hitting a home run even though we don't understand right now why we didn't.

What is new in the last 48 hours is the thinking that we are willing to swing hard again and the ability to trust again that God is able to work out a good adoption for us. What is most troubling right now is the undiminished confusion over what happened. We know what it looks like to see God work awesomely and to hear his guidance, especially from times in Morocco when we were under a lot of pressure or faced big obstacles; we saw that happening again here and it filled us with hope, but this sudden reversal and hard result has left us with a lot of confusion. It seems impossible that he could be any clearer next time, and we certainly don't want to go to our next appointment with the attitude that we are settling for second best.

Experiencing a new level of anguish and opposition here has given us a deeper appreciation for some of the psalms. Psalm 31 has stood out, especially as worded in The Message. We are also aware that we are going to grow from this; we will have new strengths and hopefully some of our idols less strength.

Frankly, we still hope that the boy would change his mind and things would still work out after all. We have even prayed along these lines, and you may wish to do so still, but we are no longer spending time thinking about that so as to free ourselves to be fully available for the next referral. One real concern about it is (again) that God will make the right children available and that we would recognize them; our facilitator was very surprised last time that there were so few children shown to us, and it would be very discouraging to walk in there after waiting for a week now and not to know what to do.