Change... Part 4

So we were now a family of 6.  At the time the kids were 7, 5, 2 and 1.  We were adjusting to our new normal when that year Randy was given two opportunities to travel with our church to Romania and then Liberia.  Neither of us had never left the United States.  I had for years researched the orphan crisis around the world.  I had focused primarily on Haiti and that was originally where I had wanted to adopt from, but we did not meet the criteria.  That year I watched Randy return from each trip with a totally new perspective on the world.  It was no longer a news story or something his wife talked endlessly on about.  He hugged the kids who had never known the outside of an institution, he took numerous photographs of children and adults who would crowd the camera.  I remember thinking how they so desperately seem to need to be remembered.  He had scene the depths of poverty and the smelled the reality many people in the world live within.  He came home from both trips and had to take sometime to readjust to everything he had known being turned upside down.  We knew their names, their stories and knew that their hopes and dreams mirrored many of our own.  They wanted a better future for their kids, they wanted to have real relationships, they wanted their lives to matter.  He traveled to Liberia in November of 2006, the girls had been home 10 months and that Christmas I felt that stirring in my heart to add one more baby.  Come January Randy agreed to pray about it.  The next morning I got a phone call from Liberia about a 2 year old boy that needed to be adopted.  We choose to move forward and push off the idea of a newborn.  A few weeks later we found out this boy had 2 older siblings.  We were offered a chance to either adopt all 3 or separate the youngest and adopt just him.  I knew immediately after seeing the bonds between my kids that we could never separate these kids.  They were all they had and I could not do that to them.  However when we though about the reality of 7 children, we were scared.  It seemed too much, they wouldn't fit in our car, our house and we had no idea how you support 7 children!  We discussed it before I had to take Alex to a cheerleading practice.  When I left we had decided we could not do that.  We had planned on calling the agency and letting them know that we could not separate them and therefore not adopt the boy.  I left home feeling defeated.  I felt like I had read so much about the crisis in Africa and I had heard Randy talk about it and saw the pictures and here I was with a clean house, plenty of food and a desire to be a mother and yet I didn't feel like I could wrap my mind around it all.  As I came back home I felt like the world's problems were too big for someone like me.  I was a young mom, I didn't finish college, I had no important job.  I was just a housewife.  I walked through the door and put the kids to bed and Randy said so I called the agency and I told them...... we will take them all......  My jaw dropped and my heart about burst!  I began to believe hey maybe a homeless kid and teenage mom can make a difference after all!!  We sold our house, sold our car, bought double and triple bunks and we began the endless paperwork. I was so excited to see that our dreams were coming true, we were going to bring home a 2, 5 and 8 year old.  Then we learned something very important, a desire to do something does not always look like what you think it will look like, sometimes its a journey, a hard journey.  We got a call and learned those 3 children had been removed from the orphanage by family and would not be able to be adopted.  We were heartbroken and crushed.  We looked at the empty van, the empty beds and we felt defeated.  I felt like I had been stupid to think that this would really happy, I felt naive and it truly rocked our world.  The agency said we could wait for another available child.  Sometimes doing the right thing hurts.