Once we returned from China last summer, our resolve to begin a new adoption began to waver. It's not that we didn't want to have another child join our family. In fact, we couldn't get all of the children we had left behind in China out of our minds and hearts. It was just that we were tired and overwhelmed. And for the first time in 22 years we felt complete. When our family is faced with any dilemma, big or small, we pray and ask God what he wants us to do. That's what we did.
Then late August, early September an answer appeared. At that time I felt that I was pregnant! An impossibility to be sure from a couple who had struggled most of our married life with infertility issues and not something we had planned for at all!! But the fact was that I looked and felt pregnant. What was more, there was a cricket in our bedroom wall! It sang all night, and in the morning I kept thinking about that cricket and what crickets mean in China. I did some research and came up with articles that said crickets mean blessings and many children!! You can imagine how interested I was to find out more. Was God talking to us about a third child being added to our family? Were we really not complete as a family?
That's when I read this verse in Deuteronomy 7:13 It says, "He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers. He will bless the fruit of your womb, the crops of your land - your grain, new wine, and oil - the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks in the land that he swore to your forefathers to give you." Whoa - did I just read that right? Could I really be pregnant (at my age!) and was he going to bless us with a way to finance this third child? I was on a leave of absence from my teaching position, and that is one of the issues we had struggled with - doing without my teaching salary and relying on my home tutoring business.
I know at this point some of you might be thinking, "Oh, no, here she goes again. Finding things that support what she wants to hear!" But over the years, I have learned to hear God's voice in many ways. One of them is through the Bible. It is God's living word, and I have found answers time after time to struggles I am facing. I have found answers addressing exactly what I have faced so many times and exactly what I have just asked in prayer. As a believer in Christ, I don't believe that is a coincidence. I believe with all my heart that he does speak to us through his word. It is powerful, and it is alive! More on that topic later. Kevin and I believed it so much that I took 4 pregnancy tests! Each one came back negative, but until the last one, I really felt I was pregnant. What did that mean?
It certainly peaked our interest and began to open our hearts to another child. Thinking that I was pregnant at almost 50 was a little scary. And one thought kept surfacing. . .if we were going to add to our family, we really didn't want to be pregnant - we wanted it to be through adoption! But here we thought we were pregnant, and if we were, then it was surely from God. We had to give it over to God and let him work out the details and the worries. As it turned out, I was not expecting a child in the physical way, but our hearts began to think "pregnant" in the adoption way again. They call it "paper pregnant" when you adopt because of the mounds of paperwork! Well, we began to think of ourselves as "adoption pregnant" again from that time on.
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