A Double Blessing

Something just clicked into place last night like a missing piece of a puzzle found.



Way back in October of 2007 when it looked like our adoption journey wasn't going anywhere, Kevin and I were taking a walk one day (October 11th to be exact) in our favorite park filled with beautiful trails and scenic winding roads. It was a special place for us to go several times a week to unwind from the stress of the teaching day.



We had begun this serene little habit of walking 3 - 5 miles at a time shortly after Ted left for college in his freshman year. Here it was his second year away from home and our second year into our adoption journey.

Our Ted (with cousin Mary)

Anyway, as we often did, we were discussing our adoption. That day in particular we were very down, just beginning to realize how long the wait could be and feeling like we might grow too old to ever have any more children again. We usually used these walks to talk and pray about the week's events and always about our adoption.



We took another road that day (because I was in desperate need of a port-a-potty just a little distance away down another road we had NEVER traveled before). This road was different than our usual route because instead of a canopy of trees covering the sky, this road was wide open to the sky above us.



It was a funny sort of day - not sunny really but surely not cloudy! There was NO rain in site, but we happened to look overhead admiring that we could see the sky and guess what??

Overhead just as plain as anything was a DOUBLE RAINBOW!!

There wasn't even any rain, but here was a beautiful double rainbow! And to think that if we had not come down this road, we never would have seen it that day.




Kevin immediately asked what a rainbow meant in the Bible. I said that it meant a promise from God when he put it into the sky after Noah and his family were saved from the flood.




Kevin then said that he just knew it was meant to show us that God had promised us another child long ago (which had happened through a friend one day when Ted was just in grade school. She had called to say that she felt God tell her to pass along a message to us. That message was to not get discouraged. God would give us a second child someday!) That had been so long ago! But Kevin just knew this day and this sign was a message from Heaven.




I wasn't convinced and continued to be pretty down at that time, feeling like our second child would never arrive, but Kevin was so sure. In fact he was so sure that it meant something good was happening in China for us that we wrote it down on our calendar just in case we needed to remember it.




The next day Kevin shared about the double rainbow with his friend Britt. Kevin and Britt held a Bible study once a week in the wee hours of the morning before school started and had prayed often about our adoption.




The next week, Britt called to tell us to look in the sky. There was ANOTHER double rainbow. Sure enough, there was a double rainbow again without any rain in sight!! We noted this date on our calendar as well.



WHEN WE RECEIVED OUR REFERRAL FOR PHILIP IN THE SPRING OF 2008, we noticed that between the two dates when we saw the double rainbows PHILIP HAD BEEN HAVING HIS MEDICAL EXAMS TO READY HIM FOR ADOPTION. Our adoption! Looking back, we could clearly see how God had given us a sign back in October, and here was proof of his promise - Philip himself!

Our Philip

If that wasn't miracle enough, something happened yesterday to jog my memory about the SECOND date of the second rainbow we had noted on the calendar.




We were just driving along last night on the way to the gym to work out, when all of the sudden I remembered the double rainbow, and then I remembered something else. Eli was born in October of 2007. I mentioned this to Kevin, and when we returned home, I checked the calendar to see when the exact dates of the double rainbow sightings were. The first one had happened on October 11.




But don't ya know -



The second double rainbow we saw was on October 23rd in 2007.



The TWO sightings of the DOUBLE rainbow had meant much more than we could even fathom at the time. They meant double the blessing from China because . . .

Eli was born on October 23, 2007!





Our Eli

God is good!

And God is faithful to his promises.