Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4, NIV)
I have a friend who tells people that she’s praying for God’s best for them.
I honestly didn’t think much of it years ago, but as my husband and I struggled with infertility and turned our focus toward adoption, her words kept popping into my head.
What does God’s best for us look like?
Experts believe there are 2 million families in this country waiting to adopt, which means that for every child being placed, there could be dozens of families submitting their profiles. In our experience, even in foster care, we could be one of 50 families who submitted a profile. In private adoption, sometimes more than 100 families had their profiles shown to a birth mom.
The average wait time for our agency, Lifeline, was two to three years.
Before starting this process, I hadn’t considered the pain of rejection. But before submitting a profile to a birth mom or foster care agency, so much thought and prayer must come first. If the answer is “yes,” life is forever changed! Therefore, every time my husband and I agreed to have our profile shown, we had to be committed on a deep level.
We thought the 9-year-old would be ours. We felt the same about the six-month-old twins. The toddler in foster care in our hometown – surely he was meant for us. As the rejections piled on, I kept crying out to God.
Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
Through it all, we kept talking to God, striving to understand what he desired for us, following where we felt the Holy Spirit lead.
Until one day, in mid-July, we received the call that changed our lives. It wasn’t for the 10-year-old we’d been praying for well over a year. It was for a seven-month-old baby whose mother asked on an early-morning Zoom call, “How soon can you get here?”
My oldest friend immediately dropped off diapers and other necessities on our doorstep. We bought a car seat on the drive up, and about nine hours later, we met our son, Jordan.
On Dec. 15, Jordan became ours in the eyes of the law, though God had it planned from the beginning.
Jordan is God’s best for us. And because God told me as the months went by to widen our prayer circle, so many have rejoiced with us on a deep level.
Jordan is our miracle.
PRAYER: Father God, we thank you for the gift of family. We thank you for prayer warriors who come alongside us and pray that your desires become ours. Help us to be that person for others in the New Year.