Wednesday, August 31, 2011

I Will Praise Him

First of all, I just want to say THANK YOU for all of the prayers, love, support, everything!!  We are so blessed to know such caring people.  God has really blessed us with so much support and it helps…A lot.  Every word of encouragement and every prayer gives us wind in our sails. 

So, here's another piece of our adoption journey! 

I had been living in CA with my hubby and 2 dogs and we were married almost 4 years by then.  Chris and I were extremely happy and content with where we were in life.  We were not in any kind of hurry to have children, although we knew we would eventually take the leap!  At the time, my sister was pregnant and I wanted to fly home to see her before she gave birth.  So when she was around 7 months pregnant, I flew to MS and stayed a week with my family.  It was a wonderful week, but towards the end of it, I remember sitting in the living room with my daddy.  He was sitting in his recliner and we were chatting a bit about life.  He asked me, "so when do you feel that you and Chris will have children?"  He completely caught me off guard!!  I stuttered around a bit and said, "Well, I'm not really sure…we are pretty happy right now, we really aren't in any hurry..."  My dad then said, "I just can't understand that, Maria... when I had the 3 of you, my life became complete.. I can't imagine life without y'all..."  WELL, that got my thoughts churning.  For my daddy to say something like that to me, wow... it made me feel so loved... I could FEEL how much he loved me just through those words and I knew then that I was ready to have children of my own.  I called Chris, told him what my daddy had said, and we began our journey into parenthood... Our sweet girl was born in May 2005 and my daddy was right, I could not imagine life without her.

            My family flew out to CA in rotations to meet our sweet daughter.  I absolutely LOVED having them visit us.  My parents came out on the 2nd rotation and just loved all over their grandbaby.  However, during their visit, my dad started feeling bad.  His lymph nodes started swelling and he knew that something was very wrong.  I could tell that my mother was very worried about him.  She told me the symptoms he was having and I talked with him about letting us take him to the doctor.  He refused, saying that he would be fine and that there was nothing to worry about.  Well, after making it back to MS and going straight to the doctor, he was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and sadly, he passed away 7 months later.  God so graciously gave my daddy the perfect words to say to me.  Because of this, he was able to hold his sweet granddaughter.  I miss him every single day.

            Life with G has been wonderful!  I love her so much that I really can’t put it into words!  All I knew then was that I wanted more.  I had to have more children.  My husband and I discussed how many children we would want to have and we both agreed on a dozen of them!  J 
So we got pregnant pretty quickly once we made the decision to go for number 2.  13 weeks later, I lost the baby. I was floored, crushed, confused, hurt, you name it, I felt it.  I just could not understand why it happened!  But with God’s help, we got through it… and surely it wouldn’t happen again…

            Chris ended up having to take a tour to S. Korea and was away for 1 year.  It was the longest year of our lives!  Once he returned home in Feb. 2009, we had to pack everything up for our huge move to Germany… We left MS on Easter Sunday with our sweet G and everything we owned and made the long flight to our new home at Ramstein AB.  AND, I was 6 weeks pregnant!  Life could not be better.  I had my husband back, G was on cloud 9 that her family was back together, and we were so excited to have another child.  Then it happened, I lost the baby.

            So by now, we really started thinking that adoption would be our only way to have more children.  Those two miscarriages left a huge hole in my heart that needed to be filled…  It had to be filled.  I prayed and prayed for God to allow us to have another child.  We had everyone praying that prayer for us.  God heard those prayers and our sweet little G was born in October 2010.  Praise God!

            I felt complete.  I actually told people that little G had filled a hole in my heart and that I knew that if I could never give birth to another child that I would be okay with that.    A few months after making that statement, the hole came back.  This time, I knew that it was not for another biological child, it was for an orphan.  I knew that God was issuing that official call to adopt and little did I know, God was working on Chris as well.

Up next, “The least of these…”

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