Change Part 5

I spent a lot of time in prayer.  I doubted myself, my hopes, my God you name it.  I learned perseverance.  After a month I got a call and learned that 2 new boys were ready to be adopted.  They were brothers, 5 months old and 3.  Again my heart leaped!!  It was going to happen!  I saw their picture and I realized that 2 little African boys were going to be my sons.  We rearranged the beds, as now we had to put up a crib. A few weeks later I was talking to my friend who happened to be the agency director about a girl that was supposed to be adopted and the adoptive parent was unable to complete the adoption.  My heart broke as I thought about them telling a little 6 year old that she was not going to be adopted.  That the world forgot her.  My friend said unless....and I immediately finished with we can adopt her, we still have the extra bed!!  And so we were back on track to adopt 3 children.  Five months later Randy was in Liberia for a second time picking up our 2 boys and 1 girl.  We were now parents of children aged 8, 7, 6, 3, 3, 2 and 11 months old. Did it solve the orphan crisis in Africa?  If you ask our 3 African children, they would say it did for them. We went from 2 to 7 children in 2 years and life got CRAZY!!  I learned how to grocery shop with 4 kids under 4 hanging off the cart.  I found out that with 9 people you never make a single recipe...you double or triple.  I learned that I was made to do this, I was so excited to tell anyone who would listen that if I can do this anyone can!! I have no special training or skills.  It was not however easy, many days I felt like I wanted to throw in the towel, Randy was my rock during that time.  I always thought about how he went from no family around him to never getting 5 minutes alone without a little one hanging off of him, or a wife craving adult interaction!  I watched him become the man I knew was inside many years ago.  The one who knew how to love deeper then most because he knew what it felt like to not have it in his life.  I watched each of my children go from timid strangers to sons and daughters, true sisters and brothers.  I saw how racial tensions are ridiculous because although we may have 2 races living under one roof, we all had the same feelings, desires and everything else.  I started to see the world completely different.  I wondered how many people I judged because of how they look or how they spoke and I was ashamed to admit how little diversity I had allowed in my life.  Now pictures of adoptable children didn't look like unnamed masses, they looked like my kids, they looked like one child at a time that could be helped.  A solution seemed possible and I would go nuts walking around seeing people with so much space at their table and so much to give who never gave a second thought to opening their home.  I knew for sure that if they met these kids or if this kid wandered onto their front yard they would not be turned away, the problem was, it is easy to ignore a problem when you don't experience it. I would later learn I wrongly believed I knew the BEST way a person can change the world.  I learned quickly that life with 7 children is hard, especially when your children have been through trauma.  When you adopt a child you sign up to walk alongside a hurting child, you feel their pain, you hold their hand, you struggle when they struggle, you realize that you don't have all the answers. However, I had seen with Randy that sometimes people don't need you have all the answers or all the tools to fix a problem, they just need someone to stand next to them and let them know they are not walking alone.  They need to know they matter and they belong to something bigger then themselves.