The White Family (Ethiopia to India)
Our adoption journey began with Ethiopia. After nearly 4 years of paper chasing, dossier updating and waiting, wait times increased even more, with the trend of continuing to increase greatly. At the time we wanted to adopt a boy who was considered healthy. When we were told of the ever growing wait times and the need for families to adopt from India we had a lot of thinking and praying to do. We felt like we weren’t just giving up on a country or adoption but on a child that was meant to be a part of our forever family. Switching countries was so hard. It didn’t make sense to us and it hurt.
We had to let ourselves grieve that loss and wrap our minds around starting the new paperwork and a new dossier essentially from scratch. We decided to take all of the boundaries off of our referral requests. We changed our desired referral to either a boy, girl, or siblings as well as being open to an ‘unhealthy’ child. In our minds, after our adoption journey thus far, we expected all time frames to be ‘with the trend of increasing.’ It turns out that this was not so with our Indian adoption.
We transferred to the India program in February of 2016, received a referral in July of 2016, and traveled to India to pick up our son in February of 2017!
We had countless people in our process tell us that only God could have caused our timeline to move so quickly. We faced immense hurdles, like raising thousands of dollars in a much shorter time period and my visa, that was supposed to be valid for 10 years, coming back only valid for 3 months. We were supposed to travel in the summer of 2017 and that got moved up to April. To everyone’s surprise, it then got moved up to February! We got a call that we would be traveling within a weeks time. We weren’t even supposed to be going to India for another month or more and now we have been home as a family for over two months. We truly believe that God parted the waters and allowed us to walk on dry land through our adoption process with India. God shifted big, unmovable mountains for our son.
Through the ups and downs of our time in India and as we adapt to life as a forever family we keep reminding ourselves of one thing- God chose us. He knew we didn’t have the funds, He knows our potential to fail, He knows the ways we lack and the ways that we were unprepared and still He chose us. And He chooses us. And chases us. And captivates us with our son’s smile and laughter each and every day. My husband and I often look at each other and say, “Is this real?! We get to be together forever!” It is real and God is in and over every moment of our time as we connect and learn each other. It feels like our son just came home and yet it feels like he’s been with us forever. The path to the promise didn’t make sense to us at the time but it couldn’t be more clear now.
"But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus" - 2 Corinthians 7:6
"Rejoice in our confident hope. Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying." - Romans 12:12