Pictures and Confirmation

by Ruth

It was a beautiful, sunny Wednesday afternoon.  It was the day before the Global Leadership Summit started.

It was also the afternoon of our monthly BFF get-together.   Not only that, but it was our August meeting which means it was our annual visit to Glenda’s cottage on Algonquin Lake.

I had a ton of things I needed to do on this day.  But I didn’t want to miss out on our meeting either.  Not only did I want to be there that afternoon, I needed to be with them.  I had something to share – and, nope, it was not about adopting.  That was still under wraps at this point.

We talked, and laughed, and shared.  Ate some good food and played a fun game with jewelry.  Sue proposed a service project – making cute felt nativity sets to send to some orphans in the Ukraine that her son-in-law and daughter have contact with.

In fact, Sue had just recently returned from visiting them.  She passed around pictures of some of the orphans they had interacted with on their visit.  Before I began flipping through them I had to wonder what looking at them would do to me.  Would they tug at my heart?  Would I feel compelled, like I wanted to adopt them all, especially now that the word adoption was in the forefront of our minds?   Would they affect me like the phrase “find me a family – even if it’s in Norway” had?  I think you have to be pretty hard-hearted if a picture of an orphan doesn’t tug at your heart just a tiny bit.  And they did tug at mine a little.  But there was one orphan tugging at my heart a lot.  Just one.  And his picture was not in the stack of photos I was looking through.

In fact, there was some confirmation coming through loud and clear.  Confirmation that if Doug & I were to pursue adoption, we would not be considering younger children.   We would be looking at, or rather, we were being called to consider someone from one of the hardest-to-place adoption categories.

Teen-age boy.

A thought many would tremble at.  Question.  Say “no way”.

But it felt right.  We had peace.  Complete and utter peace.

There was only one explanation for it.   It was God-given.