Our paperwork for our supervising agency here in Maine is complete and has been sent to our agency. Now starts the wait. Not the really hard one but one of the many little passing waiting periods that only give us a glimpse into the myriad of emotions we will feel when we begin the big wait for a referral. We signed many documents releasing information to our agency so they can better determine our eligibility to be adoptive parents. Now our agency will send out these documents and wait for the respective departments, agencies and offices to respond. Once all those responses come back, and if we are then found fit to adopt, we will be assigned a social worker and schedule a Homestudy.
Though we are not yet officially waiting for a referral, this wait is part of the whole adoption process and therefore is, for all intents and purposes, the wait for our children we have not met, who have been separated from us, and we are leveraging our lives and every penny we can scrape to rescue and to reunite them with us.
This is the first time in this journey that God has stirred in me a pining to get my children safely home. It is quite a strange thing to feel a longing for children I do not even know yet. All I can think about when I reflect on it is this... "My children are out there somewhere in an orphanage and are not receiving the love, comfort, care and attention that I can give them as their father." Maybe they are not even in the orphanage yet, maybe they are crying themselves to sleep out of pain from malaria in some slum after a long day with no food and a host of mistreatment.
