Catching Up: The Power of Prayer (Reflection)

Can I just tell you how hard it was to swallow what God had just called us to do? Adoption has always always always been something we had talked about doing. In fact, it's something we knew we wanted to do...after we were done "having kids."

Well it's just like God to laugh at our plans isn't it? Just as hard as it was to swallow the calling to adopt, it was incredibly exciting as well. Joe and I looked at each other and laughed because God not only answered our prayers, but slapped us in the face with the answer!

I have always been a "prayer," I pray every morning and always have. I know that prayer is powerful but I tell you right now that I had never truly felt the power of prayer until that moment. I don't ever remember feeling so close to God as I did at that very moment. As Christians we often feel that prayer will solve things, that prayer will fix things and in some ways it does but it also doesn't always change things the way that we have planned. Throughout this whole journey so many people have told me "God has a plan for you." I've recited Jeremiah 29:11 countless times but until I saw it actually working in my life, I did not truly understand why God was putting me through this. It's so easy to have the "why me" mentality when facing infertility and I was no exception. No matter how much I prayed or how much I said I was "giving it to God" I hadn't truly surrendered our lives and our situation to him until that week before that cold November morning.

For so long we prayed "just this one thing" God, this one thing...let us be parents. Let this month be the month, let this cycle be the one that works. But God had a different plant. All along he was preparing our hearts and our minds and our spirits to be parents...but not in the way we had planned.

So there we were...God's calling staring us in the face. 

Adoption is not for everyone. But it is for us and we would soon find out that God was ready far more than we were!