Leaving Ukraine

An interesting Coldplay song was setting the mood in the cafe as I sat down just now:

Come up to meet you, tell you I'm sorry
You don't know how lovely you are
I had to find you, tell you I need you
And tell you I set you apart...

Running in circles, chasing tails
Coming back as we are

Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard

I'm going back to the start.

We are back in Kiev and have booked flights to leave early tomorrow morning. We stopped at the SDA and signed a petition to withdraw our application, obviously not as enthusiastically as we signed the original petition to adopt. There is nothing more that can be done here towards any kind of adoption without a new dossier, and we already have worked out with the facilitator exactly what we need to do to create one, although we have a lot of other processing to do when we get home. All we know right now is that we love Ukraine more than ever, are more passionate than ever about adoption, and will be given the opportunity on Nov 11 to ask the SDA for a referral to adopt children of any age range we choose. Only God knows how that and the other details of our lives will translate into action.

Right now we are sitting in a cafe taking advantage of our first chance to be alone since yesterday morning, the morning when our last hope for adopting on this trip fell apart. I should fill in a little detail on that. On Tuesday, the girl had said that she wanted to come with us even if her older brother didn't. That evening, the SDA recommended that we try to adopt just the younger two, so we were still hopeful on Wednesday morning; however, when it came to decision time, the girl was not willing. This was hard for us, not only because it was a surprise (she had been very engaging with us from the first day and had actually come to Julie looking for a hug at the end of our last play visit) but also because she communicated her decision with much less conviction than her brother or the earlier boy did. Prior to that moment, every disappointment had been for me softened to some extent by the expectation that God would come through at the last minute to save the day in a surprising way.

That pretty much covers the news. Thanks for your comments and encouragements, which have lessened the added difficulty of experiencing this while alone in an unfamiliar environment. We certainly welcome questions.

I will also paste in some of my personal journaling from last night. It is probably the most efficient way to show that we are not in despair even at this early point. Please forgive any redundancies.

I guess we graduated to a bigger grief. I can’t help thinking that before Morocco we would have been crushed by this one-two punch, so I think we are growing; God noticeably answered our prayers for peace in the last 48 hours, too. In the first referral, we started out with all the odds against us; in this one, everything looked favorable from the beginning, so it was a bigger shock. We were farther down the road of imagining them in our home, and things looked more positive at absolutely every point. The girl’s change of heart was very disappointing, because she seemed to be candid and engaging from the first day, unlike the older brother, who was reserved and brooding a lot of the time; I suspect that she may feel regret much sooner than the older brother because it was for her a momentary lapse of courage rather than a calculated decision.

Bottom line: we gave an awesome opportunity to 3 decision-making kids and 2 tag-along kids, and that is surely a good thing per se. Kids are smart and able to make choices; unfortunately these were not wise enough to make good ones, but we can’t control them. We should not let our happiness depend on these kids’ choices, though, any more than we would while raising children at home (cf. Danny Silk); if we are strong enough to raise hurt children, then we are strong enough to move on to other children who will at least give us a chance. We are more like God in this journey than we ever have been.

We are experiencing this grief, even the same day, with a strong sense of gratitude:

• that we can still have a positive outlook on the big picture (where some have become immobilized and cynical),
• that our eyes were opened enough to accept the awesome adoption offer from our heavenly Father,
• that we are going home to a comfortable and manageable life surrounded by loving friends and family,
• that we gained rich new experiences and skills while connecting deeply to Ukraine,
• that we have a deeper passion for adoption and orphans,
• that we have been blessed in so many ways, after seeing a country that struggled under cruel domination for so long and so many people that still have hard lives,
• that we had the honor of bringing a little bit of blessing into the lives of 5 hurt kids.

Our specific dreams have been dashed to pieces, and I think we will always carry the grief of having been parents to these specific, precious children for only a few days, but our dream of adopting and even of adopting in Ukraine is still alive (even though we continue to give God permission to replace it). One of our daily themes here has been that our efforts are in vain unless he is building our home; they are just our cooperative obedience because he includes us in the process. We have also consistently defined success as obedience, not a specific result, and in this moment he is giving me the joy of being in his arms and the feeling of doing exactly what he made me for. I feel much more empowered to wait for the right opportunity than before, less concerned about the cost, and more passionate than ever about the importance of adopting hurt kids.