A Secondary Blessing...Josh

So by now you are all familiar with the insane blessing we have received in the last 2 weeks in our new daughter Celia.  What you may not have heard about is the secondary blessing that has come from our family listening to God, and his name is Josh.

This journey all began when Mike and I saw Josh's picture on a Facebook page of an adoption agency that specialized in resolving adoption disruptions.  I found their page about a year ago and have been following all of their posts since then of children who were looking for a new placement.  Josh's picture came across my computer on Sept. 10th, 2013.  He was 5 years old, Ethiopian, and his family was choosing to disrupt his adoption.  I looked at Mike and said "Well, we say that this is what we are looking for.  It's literally in our laps, so what are we going to do about it?".  I emailed his social worker that night to get more information.  We emailed back and forth a few times and I got more information with each message.  We were ready to begin our homestudy and move forward with pursuing him...until I suddenly got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that he wasn't our son.

I felt so guilty about feeling this way.  If we didn't move forward with him, then who would?  He had some issues that we had dealt with before, we could handle this, but it would scare off most (sane) people.

 I decided to share his story on our regional FB page for families with Ethiopian children in the hopes that I could maybe help find him a family (I knew this was a LONG SHOT).  Within hours of me posting this I got a call from my friend Jamie.  "Tell me about disruptions." she said.  She had experience in international adoption and parenting kids from hard places, but not in disruption.  We talked for a very long time.  As it turned out, Jamie and her husband had already began the process for adopting a child internationally through the VERY SAME AGENCY that was handling Josh's case!!  GOD IS GOOD!!  This meant they had already paid their agency fees and already had a homestudy completed with them!

They moved forward with his adoption and put their plans of adopting internationally on hold for the time being.  They brought Josh home the same week we brought Celia home!  We even had out first social worker visit through the courts on the same night!

Josh is the one with his tongue sticking out ;)

Our family prayed hard for this little guy, every night.  I know now why I had that feeling in my gut.  He wasn't my son...he was Jamie's.  My favorite part of this story (selfishly) is that our family will now be able to get to know this boy, we will be at the same Christmas parties, the same summer picnic year after year.

I am honored at how God used allowed our family to play a small role in their family's story.