This week, Older kids

Hopefully we have been able to convey a lot of the experiences including the emotions of these years of our adoption process. Words only go so far, though, so I will also link to some of the music we are listening to. This is a song that didn't grab me much until I heard this new "Rock of Ages" rendition, and some of the lyrics have really resonated: "This might hurt; it's not safe... I don't care if I break... I don't want to spend my whole life asking, 'What if I had given everything?' No regrets, not this time. I'm going to let my heart defeat my mind, because 'Just OK' is not enough." As we are starting to see the amazing thing that God is unfolding in our lives and still trusting him to bring us through the next steps on his path, we are so thankful that we did not settle for anything easier or safer.

Going into this critical week of finding out tomorrow (Monday) the details about our assigned court date and judge and hopefully actually having the court session late in the week, it's appropriate to bring back a blog quote from the day that everything finally fell apart last summer:

One of our daily themes here has been that our efforts are in vain unless he is building our home [Ps. 127]; 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.

We have gotten very close to these girls, and it's awesome that they seem as interested in connecting with us as we are with them. But there are other factors in the process, so this is the key time to be praying as lots of things need to still go right. After the court decision, there still will be a ten-day appeal window, but an appeal is a very rare thing and the remaining paperwork will be pretty much just a matter of doing it.

When people asked about whether the process would be the same for this trip as for the last, we mentioned that we were eligible for younger children this time, but also that we were bringing paperwork that would let us adopt children as old as 11, as the summer's experience (and our reading) had really opened our hearts to the idea of adopting older children than we had thought was practical when we made the original application.

On the topic of older children, I really want to talk a little bit about some of the ones we have met in this orphanage. We have been very rightly focused on our girls so far in our blogging, but I have been so impressed by my interactions with the teenagers we have met here that I want to say at least a few words about them. There are at least 6 of them that we have gotten to know by name, and we have occasionally included one or another of them in our games or conversations. These kids, probably 13-15 years old, are mature, resourceful, responsible, kind, sincere, and just plain fun; some of them also have decent English, and they have always spoken respectfully and amiably with us from the first day we walked in. They often are the ones that go get our girls when we arrive. One of them is in charge of the key to the library where we meet and is also in charge of cleaning it (which meant she found and returned a nice earring that Julie lost one day). They are obviously functioning as role models for our girls and responsible in some part for (and, I believe, also products of) the positive climate in this particular orphanage (one of these days we will perhaps contrast it favorably with the other two we have visited); there were surely adults supervising in classrooms and infirmary, but I did not see any adults in the halls and courtyard. (The fact that kids here have chores is a great preparation for life and antidote to an entitlement mentality, and is definitely not true everywhere.) Another, rather shy one approached our facilitator quietly recently while he was to the side and shared some of her story with him and asked if he would be able to find a family for her.

That reminds me of the neat Texan family that we met this summer who came with all their kids to adopt a specific 16-year-old girl in a Christian orphanage that they had heard about . We got to hang out with them and their new daughter a little bit while we were waiting in Kiev. Here is their blog: http://www.davidkirk.org/, although there certainly are many interesting adoption blogs. One site that is a sort of unofficial Ukraine adoption blog hub is http://pretreadoptionblog.blogspot.com/; it is run by a family that adopted two teenagers two years ago, but also has links in the margin to tons of other blogs.

I guess I'm not saying that everyone should think about adopting Ukrainian teenagers, but there is a kind of negative stereotype about adopting teenagers that is out there and that I had. I am now getting to know impressive teenagers that would be very easy to consider adopting, and I have seen on the blogs that a lot of people have done that and not regretted it, especially since many are very motivated to make things work, so I hope that I can at least correct that stereotype a little bit.