The Decision

So we have 2 weeks to accept or decline our referral. We decide to follow the original plan.....there is a special department at MUSC, the children's hospital, for international adoption.  You basically pay a fee and then send all of your referral information, pictures, videos, etc. They will review all of the information and then give you whatever their assessment/findings are. They have 48 hours to review and get back to you. ....while I feel like every second counts, and that is 48 hours longer that we will potentially be separated from our son, we need to be diligent. So we send the info an wait.
The doctor calls and says that K appears to be healthy and well nourished> he has the sickel cell gene, but its not active and should have limited to no effects on him. She also says that he is probably more like 4, rather than 3. (We already knew that his exact age was in question, and thought he looked a little tall for a 3 year old.) She said this is very common with African adoptions. For whatever reason, the children are often stated to be younger that they really are. Sometimes this is intentional to make the children seem more desirable, and sometimes its just because they really do not know the exact age. How could this be? Well, if they find the children orphaned in the streets, then they have absolutely no history or source of information.  Other than that, life is just very different. I am told they don't use calendars, they don't usually get birth certificates when they are born, they don't have their babies in hospitals, and they don't celebrate birthdays. So a specific date of birth really has very little importance to them.
Oh, and I forgot to tell you that there was one more little suprise...... You may or may not know this, but Uganda was colonized by England, so they actually speak English there. So we were very surprised when we found out that K's village borders the Congo, and they speak a very foreign language there!
So this adds to our trepidation..... He is really at the top of the age range we were looking for, or older, he carries a scary gene trait that we know nothing about, and we could have a 4 or 5 year old that doesn't speak English.....on top of the fact that we were saddened to think that he actually has a grandmother who loves him but can not care for him. On top of all the loss this little guy has already experienced in his life, how could we take him from someone who is blood who loves him? Take him away from everything h
e has ever known, to a land of strange faces and strange sights, sounds, foods?
I don't know what we had in our minds, but I feel like my picture was something more of us "saving" him from a life of desolation, where he knew no family and no love. Now it saddens me deeply to think of causing more pain in his life. I just don't know.
There are 2 things I know..... one is:
God is the ONLY one who truly "saves, so I realize that maybe the idea of "saving" him is something more of a "god-complex", and we should be more focused on listening for Gods quiet still voice.
The 2nd is this: Fear is of the enemy!
2 Timothy1:7 says: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. KJV
I decide to go to prayer for God to speak to me and open my eyes to the answer.
Now that I am trying to re-focus and center back to home, I also realize God has already given us the answer, but I was so busy trying to figure it out on my own that I almost missed it! Thursday, the day before Good Friday, which is the Friday before Easter...... This is the day that we got our referral, which is also by NO COINCIDENCE the same exact day 2 years ago, that I found out we were expecting our 2nd child... our daughter Havannah Lilly.  God knew us in our mothers' wombs and he knows our hearts.  He also knew the fear that we would have and ever so perfectly planned this to calm our hearts and quiet our minds, many many years ago.
I think that as Christians we still often forget that we need not rely on our own wisdom and understanding, and if we could do it all and understand it all on our own, it would leave no room for God. We sometimes need to stop trying to do it ourselves and let God show up for us!