Russian Festival, God's Purpose, Topics: Grief

This weekend we went to Goshen for lunch to the Russian festival of the local Russian Orthodox church. Here is a local news article about it. It was fun to see the little kids dressed in very elaborate costumes doing various traditional dances and to eat some of the same foods we know from Ukrainian cuisine. I was pleased to witness what a strong Russian community there is here, well integrated into American life and still successfully preserving its heritage. We overheard even children speaking Russian with their parents. There is also a Ukrainian Orthodox church just up the road from there.

My mom recently met a Ukrainian cashier who invited her to the Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church that is also in Goshen. Julie is meeting a high-school friend this week who also lives nearby and is fluent in Russian. We will certainly have some good support nearby for helping our kids not to forget Russian.

When we walked back into the office, our whiteboard still had written on it a quote that had been encouraging to us during some challenges we had leading up to our Ukraine trip, and it seemed even more helpful in understanding what happened on the trip: "What God did in this case made it perfectly plain that his purpose is not a hit-or-miss thing dependent on what we do or don't do, but a sure thing determined by his decision, flowing steadily from his initiative. (Rom. 9:12, Msg)" Some of the reading we are doing this week is giving us some good ideas of ways we can be more effective at connecting quickly with children and ways we might influence even how the professionals we work with approach the children. However, we don't pretend that any fine-tuning of skills or rehearsing of speeches is going to make the difference in situations like this; God's purposes can not be thwarted by ignorance, by errors, or even by enemies. We don't know what his purpose for us in this adoption adventure is, but we are confident that it is going to be awesome.

A scripture that has been encouraging this week is Psalm 10. Overall, the psalm asks God why he stands far off while helpless victims are being oppressed. The tone suddenly gets more positive in verse 14, though, which says, "But you, O God, do see trouble and grief; you consider it to take it in hand. The victim commits himself to you; you are the helper of the fatherless." This reminded me that it is normal in the world for people to get away with evil and for people to be oppressed, but there is a time when the God who saw everything does intervene, and in the meantime it is right for us to ask to him to do so. The song that was in my head when I woke up on most of days in our last crazy week in Ukraine was Chris Tomlin's Everlasting God, which says, "You're the defender of the weak. You comfort those in need." It was confusing to me to be in a situation where it did not seem like he was doing that or being a "strong deliverer," but that is precisely what confused the psalmist; our limited perspective doesn't change who God is, and he will make things right.

We got just a small taste of the pain that has overwhelmed the lives of children whose life is summed up by words in the verse like "trouble," "grief," "victim," and "fatherless," and that pain was the cost of giving them a valuable opportunity to change their life. Once before I used a baseball analogy, saying that you can't hit a home run unless you swing hard, so we did not regret having gone all out. Now I will also say that you can't get a hit on every swing, but that does not mean that you shouldn't swing; every swing is a potential hit, and a good batter swings confidently, knowing that about a third of them will pay off.

Regarding the word "grief", I'm not sure that it has been clear to everyone what we mean by that. We are not talking about a whiny response to not getting what we had hoped for or to losing time, money, or emotional energy with no apparent result. I think we are OK with those things; this trip certainly wasn't our first disappointment on this adventure. For us, grief is a painful response to being separated permanently from persons we love and wanted to protect whose lives apart from us will be characterized by victimization and tragedy. Lots of things that we see and do here still remind us of the imagined future that we discussed in detail with them.

Tomorrow I'm planning to start sorting through pictures so we can get some more colorful posts again.

Topics: Why would children say no?

It is hard to believe that as recently as Wednesday of last week we were still hopeful that we would be in Ukraine for another 3 weeks and come home with children. So many big changes have happened in the last 6 weeks since we flew out there, it feels like a lifetime.

This week, we have started to get updated documents for our next dossier, and today Julie posted on the wall a checklist so we can keep track of which ones have been requested, notarized, and apostilled.

As we talk with people here, we are getting a better idea of some topics that we should spend more time discussing in the blog. Here is the first.

Why ever would children refuse to come with us?
Obviously, this is a question that continues to haunt us, and from any adult's perspective this decision is crazy, but frankly speaking it is not hard to put ourselves in the kids' shoes. They are in a situation where their basic daily needs are met and where they have grown comfortable and perhaps even confident. Even with a sense of the benefits that could be gained, the decision to give up a reasonable situation for one that would certainly turn their world upside down and leave them completely out of control is not necessarily easy. This is especially true for children whose first experience in a family was horribly negative and whose life without a secure attachment to a parent has programmed them to see control as the key to survival.

There are some specific factors that influenced the situations we saw. It is common for jealous peers to try to sabotage adoptions by scoffing or abuse, and it is hard to know how much of this was going on. The first boy appeared to be hanging onto a dream that his father would come for him; if this was a coping mechanism, it would have been even harder for him to deny it. The second boy clearly was deeply conflicted about his decision, and he was the first child that our facilitator had ever seen refuse an adoption without giving any kind of reason. (Interestingly, he had seen only one girl say no, apparently because girls seem able to bond more quickly to the prospective parents.) This decision could have been the result of something our facilitator pointed out as an unfortunate byproduct of the orphanage lifestyle (and of welfare more generally): thinking that the government will always take care of my needs and losing the inner strength to take responsibility for myself. Even though all the social workers we met were passionate about adoption, we did not get the sense that the orphanages, which are inspected but not managed by social services, actively cultivate the idea that adoption into a family is the natural next step.

On another level, whatever children join our household will have an ideal opportunity to meet and to trust Jesus Christ; the same deceiver that makes all sorts of empty things seem preferable to adoption by the King would certainly have been motivated to pull the wool over these kids' eyes. We definitely had a sense of spiritual battle around us during some of our days in the regions.

Back Home

We arrived in Chicago on Friday morning, twelve hours after we left Kiev, but not too much later local time. We had a great time catching up with Julie's parents, sister, and nephew and my mom over some Chicago deep dish pizza. I was very aware that we had not had pizza, Chinese, or Mexican in over a month, so one of those is checked off now. We got home in time for me to get in on a game night with a few of my closest friends, which was a good way to catch up with them right away.

Saturday we stayed in the house. I forgot how comfortable it is! Living out of suitcases and sleeping in less-than-perfect beds for over a month was starting to get old. We still had plenty of meat and vegetables in the freezer and various carbs in the pantry, and my mom set us up with a gallon of milk, so we didn't need to go shopping right away. Lounging in the living room over coffee gave us a lot of time to talk about what happened and to talk about what our next goals are. We feel surprisingly free; I think we had been for a long time kind of driven by trying to coordinate all the details for this adoption, and now we are back in a place of resting in what God has for us each day.

Sunday morning at church we got to see a lot of people again, and we had a good lunch at Julie's parents place. I'm glad I got back in time for the first NFL weekend. Unfortunately, an intense sore throat set in while I was watching football and pretty much leveled me for the last 24 hours. Julie says it's a classic let-down illness after pushing hard through a big event.

We're expecting to still have things to blog about this week as we sort through photos from the trip and start getting our dossier updated to send to Ukraine again.

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.

End of this Road

We are leaving for Kiev in a few minutes. The brother did not even want to see us today, and the sister said she wanted to go only if he did. This was a surprise to me. Even her body language initially seemed to say something different, but then once a person rejects someone to their face, they don't want to even look at them again or say goodbye. There really does not seem to be any point in staying, and tomorrow would have been our last day to visit in any case. So another referral has come to a sudden end.

We are not sure what we are going to do next. One option is to update any expired documents in our dossier and submit again for the same age range. Another option is to come back in midfall looking for younger kids. It is not unlikely that we will be flying home this week, though.

Critical Days

Beth was right that these are critical days. Today I said a sentence prayer out loud at lunchtime before we headed out and then commented, "This could be a great day." Our facilitator responded, "It will be a great day!" He was confident because he had a long talk yesterday with the older brother discussing his area of concern, which was learning English; at the end he had indicated that if he had to make a decision on the spot it would be yes, but he wanted a little bit of time before making his final decision. The sister was hedgy, but it was clearly because she didn't know what her brother was thinking. After that long talk, we had our best time yet with the older brother, who seemed happy and relaxed. We interpreted that to mean that his concerns had been addressed and he no longer felt conflicted about going.

Well, today was not a great day. The short version of what happened is this. The older brother was like a totally different person and insisted that he did not want to come. The sister insisted that she wanted to come even with her brother trying to get her to say no. The orphanage director (who has been fantastic and seemed as affected as we were today) and facilitator had a long talk with him and there was no reasoning with him; Julie and I also did our best to explain our hearts and to convince him. Our facilitator has done well over 100 adoptions in over 10 years and has never seen a situation like this where a child says no without giving a reason. He likes us, he trusts us, he knows his siblings both want to go, but his answer is no and he refuses to say why.

I ended the session by saying we would come back tomorrow to ask what his reason was. There was no way we were going to get any kind of good response after what unfortunately ended up turning into a marathon session for the boy. It also buys us some time to pray and for the information he heard to sink in. It is possible that he is being threatened by jealous peers. Or it could be something much more complicated. He did get teary at one point, which gives hope that he is at least conflicted. The director said she had never seen him act like this.

For us, of course, it was a kick in the gut. We still have no doubt that God has led us here, even if it ends up being to fly back alone. The facilitator commented to me on the way to the cybercafe that he was amazed that we could be so patient. The only answer is that we know God is in control even of this and he has been good to us so far and will somehow bring good to us even through this. It certainly doesn't mean that we have no tears or that we understand what God is doing.

Tonight is going to be critical. It seems like the obvious thing to pray for is for the boy to change his mind, which after all this would feel like a fairy tale ending. We also pray that he not change the other two kids' minds; if he does, there is probably no point in staying. We are not child stalkers, after all.

Please also pray for us. What is happening is very confusing, especially after some of the other disappointments surrounding this adoption in the last couple of weeks and the last couple of years. Our perspective in these two painful rejections is certainly giving us a lot of clarity about the folly not only of saying no to God's offer of being Savior but also of the dumb mistake we so often make of saying no to God's awesome gifts in favor of the whims of the flesh. We walked into our hotel room this afternoon in shock but also determined not to make the same mistake ourselves by turning to anything but God in our own need.

Sunday in the Park and a Fun Monday

Yesterday in the nice city park was pretty special, although quite an overload for me as so much was going on that I always felt like I was a step behind. The kids definitely had a blast, though. One benefit of using the same taxi driver all the time is that he was able to comment that the kids had excitedly shared all the details of the day with the orphanage director, who met us at the park at the end of the afternoon to take them back. There were several little attractions set up: steerable boats in a pond, a bouncy castle including a dragon's mouth that opened and closed on kids that jumped into it, a trampoline with bungee cords that let you jump extra high, and small electric cars that kids could drive on sidewalks, as well as sturdy steel playground equipment.

Today we had a visit back at the orphanage. Things were more fun and it felt easier to keep the kids busy than in the past. It's nice that we are getting more familiar with each other. We did things like plasticine, volleyball passing, bowling with a dodgeball and empty water bottles. The girl loves to take videos with our digital camera of her little brother's antics, and it gives us a chance to all crowd around afterwards and look.

Things are coming to a head with the decision process. We ended up not having much time to talk about that yesterday. All of the kids are fairly positive individually, but it seems that they need to communicate together privately before being confident to make a final decision, because of course they all need to be agreed in order to go. So we are hopeful, but it is not a sure thing by any means and is forcing us to keep submitting the situation to the Lord (and check occasionally to make sure we keep breathing).

Thanks for your prayers. It is always encouraging to read comments.