the choice

i don't want to spend any more time on this part of the journey. it was horrible. lots of tears. lots of agonizing. lots of praying. lots of conversations between jon and i. we tried changing how we parented while we were wrestling, and the negative effects on our children were obvious within a very short amount of time. so that was out. that left lying or parting ways.

i hate lying. i was the one in ethics class (the only one, i might add), who said that it was never right to lie. and in all honesty, after the conversation with the director that day, i cried buckets because deep in my heart, i knew we would part ways. i knew that the child that i had dreamed of, prayed for and longed for would not be. but we had to go through the wrestling.

many dear friends advocated lying or being evasive for the sake of saving a child's life. at the end of about three weeks of struggle, jon and i didn't feel like we could do it in good conscience before the Lord. i do not judge others for the decisions that they made in their adoption journeys. it just wasn't where the Lord led us.

in the midst of all of this agony, i started investigating other agencies that would help us continue our journey with adopting from the philippines. in the process of looking, i discovered a piece of information that had not been disclosed to us about the financial requirements. bottom-line, we did not meet those requirements to adopt internationally in 2010 because of the horrific year that jon had in construction the year before. we had no debt, but our income wasn't high enough in 2009. we could submit our application to the philippines working with another agency and hope that they would accept us, but they would have just cause to reject our application. at that point, we were out about $2,000. if we took the next step to send our dossier overseas, we would be out $10,000. it seemed foolish to us to put that much money out there when we didn't meet the guidelines. so after much prayer and many tears, the door to adopting from the philippines was closed.

when i tried to explain to people my grief, the best way i knew to explain it was that it felt like a miscarriage. there was a child that had been growing steadily in my heart that i would never hold. it was a tremendous loss for us.

now, we were faced with a new decision. was this the Lord telling us to stop? was He telling us to wait (until the end of 2010 so that our tax information would meet the criteria for international adoption) or were we to pursue domestic adoption?

enough with the decisions already!