After writing "Renewed Strength" I did everything that a Christian woman is supposed to do to make sure that this was the month for us. I prayed and thanked God for the baby growing inside me, I prayed for my friends facing infertility, I treated my body as if I were pregnant...and if I began to doubt that I was pregnancy I would audibly rebuke Satan and tell him that he can't create a pregnancy and that he couldn't take it away from me. Despite the fact that I had no symptoms I stood on my belief that God would make it happen this time for us.
Six weeks after my last cycle I took a pregnancy test. I waited as long as I possibly could to ensure that I would not get a false negative by testing to early. So early in the morning I took what I believed would be my final pregnancy test. I prayed as I waited for the results to show up...it was a no again.
The first thought that came into my head was that maybe God was trying to tell me something that I have been too stubborn to listen to. Maybe just maybe our baby isn't going to be packaged the way that I expected. Maybe God's blessing for our family is going to come in a different way.
The concept really isn’t that new for me and my family. If you know Chad and I separately we aren’t exactly the first two people that you would expect to be paired together, but I have no doubt that God himself chose us to be together and that God chose Chad to be Jessi’s father.
So I told my husband that the test was negative and that I was ready to look into fostering or adopting as soon as he was. Of course initially he questioned my motives and was afraid that I was just upset and this was a reaction to the bad news. I really can’t blame him because my overwhelming feeling that we should adopt really shocked me. Don’t get me wrong we have talked about adoption and always thought that instead of dealing with all this infertility junk again we would skip straight to it after our next child is born.
I have really looked at adoption as giving up, but God changed my heart that morning. He gave me peace like I’ve never had before. I didn’t have that nagging feeling that if I would have prayed harder, or stood stronger and proclaimed it to the world that it would happen. In fact God was telling me that I couldn’t use the formulas that church people have put together to make miracles happen. I don’t say that to downplay the importance of those things, many times God blesses them but if prayer and anointing oil was my key to healing then we would have dozens of babies by now.
The bottom line really is this, Chad and I have given our lives to Christ. Not just the parts that line up with our desires but our whole lives including the way He desires to build our family.
So after much discussion about what exactly this means to our family and deciding what restrictions we would place on the type of child we would open our home to we send off the application to foster to adopt today.
