Adoption Update and some decisions

Kevin and I have friends, Anita and Mark, who we met through Families with Children from China - Nashville. They adopted their BEAUTIFUL daughter, Kaylin from China recently. They moved to Florida just a while ago but we still correspond on our adoption forum and by email.

She and I were "talking" by email about our current situation with our agency. She gave me the most wonderful advice and I know that God used her to say this to us. At the end of her email, she wrote:

I’ll be praying that you CLEARLY hear God’s voice on this. Let me share something else that may not make sense right now…..TRY VERY HARD to leave the money out of it. I say that because if God has another country in mind for you guys for whatever reason, holding on to that money may prevent you from hearing Him…..NOT that you don’t have the RIGHT to get it back, but allow Him to direct you despite what you think you may lose. In the end, you may gain more than you realized that only He could have done if you let it go.

So, today at lunch, I asked Kevin, "If there were no obstacles at all to our adoption and you could choose, what would you choose?" After some thought, he replied, "I would go to Taiwan because of the quicker time frames." I asked, "Would you still go to China?" to which he replied, "Yes, I think I would."

From that point, it was so easy for us to make a plan for how to overcome these problems. We feel like the devil is attacking us in this process to try to keep us from adopting. He knows that we are going to raise our children in church and in a Christian home. He knows our ultimate goals for them will be that they accept Jesus Christ as their Savior and he knows that they will be one or two more in God's army against him.

We have a plan. We will allow God to direct it and show us the path more clearly by the choices He makes during our process. We are willing to stand up against decisions by our agency that we feel are wrong. We realize they hold some control over our adoption future because they have our money, our homestudy and could toss us out of the program, but they cannot have it both ways. They cannot dictate to us that we cannot get a refund and cannot go to another country. If we were to get pregnant, as long as the child was a year old when we adopted from China, there would be no problem. They should not, as a Christian adoption agency, be allowed to discriminate about our choices of how and from where we choose to add to our family when we feel we are being led by God to do so. And, this concurrent adoption policy was not in effect when we signed on to the China program. It is not a CCAA policy -- it is an agency policy. I have printed lots of cases from the internet of multiple agencies who are allowing this concurrent adoption to take place. We do not have a contract that I can find. I will call tomorrow to try to get a copy of anything we might have signed that I didn't copy. We are prepared to fight for our child/children who we do not know yet. We know she/they are out there and need a home and we are willing to be used by God to provide them one.

"Greater is he that is in me than is in the world."