Seven days and a wakeup!

Late Sunday afternoon we received the call we were waiting for, or so we thought. The family Edgars had met with felt it was a good fit for their family, and Edgars seemed to like them. Jennifer felt and I completely agreed it would not do for us to meet him as it would just confuse him and there was no purpose to do so. Our son James was relieved; a brother was not high on his list of things to acquire. James desperately wanted a daddy for years and once he got one he was not sure he wanted to share one. He was an only child and like that just fine. I was deflated to say the least, I mean c’mon, here was a last minute plea for someone to adopt a boy out of the blue and we were ready to step up and someone else beat us to the punch. Getting kicked in the stomach felt nicer than what I was feeling. Even so, I totally understood. Lana was crushed, totally and completely. My wife is one of the mentally toughest people I know, and this reduced her to a crying wreck that didn’t want to even get out of bed for about two weeks. She did, but she sure didn’t want to; she cried all the time and kept saying we needed to meet him. I continued to tell her that if it was God’s will for us to adopt this little boy it would happen. This did little to placate this grieving mother and she said this was a good family and there would be no Edgars for us. Once I made the mistake of asking her if she wanted to look at any of the other children to possibly adopt in either Latvia or her home country of Ukraine. BIG mistake! :) She only wanted Edgars.
Finally, I asked her if there was someone she could talk to help her through this because my efforts were totally ineffective and I was at wits end what to do next. I listed all of her friends, my family, her family, church members, pastors, everyone. She said there was only one person who could help her, a person she had never met or even talked to, that person was Krista. Lana felt that Krista was the only one who knew what she was feeling. Because of that I was not so sure Krista would want to talk to anyone about what she was feeling because Lana was a wreck and had never met this little boy and Krista had established a relationship with him and now could not adopt him. It felt like I was going to jump from the frying pan into the fire. So, I wrote a letter to Jennifer to sound out the waters with Krista. Krista agreed to talk with Lana, PRAISE THE LORD! Krista and Lana had a wonderful call and I never got all of the details of what they chatted about, but after the phone call ended Lana felt so much better. We talked and agreed that if God wanted us to have this boy - we would have him, and if He didn’t - it would not be a good thing for us to adopt him. In our conversation we agreed to possibly look at adoption in the future once we were prepared to pursue this further and specifically ready financially. When we got the first email we had no idea of the cost of this kind of adoption; we just said this little boy needs a family. Our son James is a lot like his mom, and handles change better if he has a chance to think about it first. So, as we wrapped our conversation up, we brought James in and wanted to inform him his thoughts were important to us, but if we ever chose to adopt a child it would be Lana and my decision not his. I asked him if in the future we pursued adopting another child could I count on his support. He calmly replied, “Probably not, that’s not what I want.” The reply he gave was serious, and one that I will never forget. That was ok as we still felt a loss here, but we were moving on with our lives with optimism and joy. God had another plan for Edgars and we had to be content with that.