'Redeem the time,' is how the titular phrase starts out and it's been on my heart lately. We just finalized our second adoption, after nearly eight years of paperwork, waiting, and emotional rollercoasters, I still haven't quite realized that we are done. We're just another family now, no more waiting, no more social workers or paper work, no more wondering, hoping, yearning, doubt and despair, angst and frustration. I can leave the state without permission; I don't have to check in monthly with anybody; there is no more paperwork to update. Weird!
If I could change one thing about the process, at least of those things over which I have control as the cost, bureaucracy, frustration, ungainliness are quite beyond my means to rectify, it would be to wait gracefully. The days will pass whether I am frustrated or content, anxious or at peace, despairing or hopeful. However long it takes, it is undoubtedly a long process, a full quarter of my life!, and wasting the time in angst is not helpful to anyone, most especially myself and my family nor does it help the process in the least. Why can't I just have faith, be content and hopeful that things will work out as they will, and even if they don't work out as I hope, I must still live with that reality so I might as well get used to the idea. Perhaps I have finally learned that lesson, albeit too late to help in either of my previous adoptions, but perhaps it will help in future endeavors?
They say marriage is an excellent discipleship tool and I will certainly add parenting to that list, but being waitlisted during the adoption process certainly has its own character honing aspects too. Even when it seemed like I was like to wait forever and futilely at that, even if we had not been successful, the wait would not have been in vain. 'Faith is the substance of things hoped for, a belief in things unseen,' so why can't I just wait in faith? As what can be more hoped for or unseen than waiting for an adoption to go through? But it is not completely unseen, my Father has seen it, or not, if it is not to be, He has been there (is there, will be there?, what is the proper tense for an eternal perspective?) and all He asks is that I trust Him to know how things will turn out and that He'll take care of the details in the interim. That is Faith. That is what this waiting is all about, molding me, making me more like Him; to be content in the present for He knows and will provide for the future, whatever betide. This is so much easier to say in retrospect! I wonder if one day we will all look back on all the needless fuss and bother we experienced on a daily basis and laugh at ourselves as I do now at my fruitless anxiety during our adoption wait. Wise is she who learns to wait in peace ere the wait is over!
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