Detour or Roadblock?

Have you ever watched the show "The Amazing Race"? It's a great adventure show where teams race against each other to get to different checkpoints at various exotic locale around the world. It's fun to watch teams navigate different languages, customs, and forced challenges as they race. Sometimes the teams need to make a choice between two different challenges and other times they have roadblocks placed in front of them to overcome on their way to completion.

I think adoption is a lot like The Amazing Race.

And this week, we have stumbled into a significant roadblock. Late Friday afternoon we were informed that Lesotho has signaled its intention to sign the Hague Convention for the protection of children in international adoption. With the signing of this treaty, Lesotho is seeking to ensure the protection of their orphans who are being adopted by increasing the number of checks on the orphan status of children and the intentions of the people adopting them. It is great news for the orphans of Lesotho.

It is not so great news for us.

If we are not already matched with waiting orphans by the signing date (12/1), we aren't quite sure what the future holds for our adopting of orphans from Lesotho. There are a number of options for us to consider (most of which are more expensive than we had planned.) We have made some preliminary decisions.

But we have many questions. And there are many things that we don't know. This could simply be a roadblock or it could be a detour.

News like this is never really welcome. We don't really know how to think and process through this because we don't have any answers. This serves to remind us how this whole adoption process is out of our hands. We have never been in control of it.

Today, I am thankful for the friends and family who have expressed faith where we have doubt, who have lifted up prayers when our lips are wordless, who have listened to the questions of our hearts, and have offered encouragements when it is so needed.

Today, I am thankful that the Sunday School lesson I had to teach was on how God hears our prayers. He may not answer in the time or way that we desire, but he always hears.