And not just told but felt somewhere deep in our souls.
This is one of those stories.
This is the story of a God who intimately knew the desires of our hearts, who was subtly making all things new in our own lives even as we wept in confusion, who continues to work powerfully to orchestrate the coming together of all things for good.
This is the story of our daughter, Liberty.
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After nearly three years of infertility and closed adoption doors, a few days before Christmas it seemed so sure that God was making a way for us to adopt. Through a series of conversations, we found out about a birth mother who was due at the end of January and had yet to chose a family to adopt her child. Door after door swung wide open for us to adopt this baby. The little one was even due in between my two sister-in-laws due dates! It all seemed so perfect.
Then December 23rd it all fell apart. Christmas day I was pretty numb. I struggled to find joy and cried out to the Lord asking why He had given and then taken away.
I have an app on my phone of devotionals by John Piper called Solid Joys. That day God spoke to me so clearly through John Piper's words about Christmas...
"Christmas was God's most successful setback. He has always delighted to show his power through apparent defeat. He makes tactical retreats in order to win strategic victories...And this is God's way for us. The way up is down. The way forward is backward. The way to success is through divinely appointed setbacks. They will always look and feel like failure, but if Christmas teaches us anything it is this: 'God meant it for good!' " ~John Piper
Well little did we know, but THIS divinely appointed failure we would soon find out paved the way for God's strategic victory in our family's lives.
After that failed match, I was scared to move forward, but God gave my husband Cory the courage to keep walking in faith. We had already paid for an expedited home study, so our plan after the new year was to slowly investigate more and begin our home study.
On Friday January 17th I saw an advertisement about an adoption entity in need of prospective adoptive families. When I clicked on the advertisement, I recognized the name. A friend of ours had used this agency for their adoption a few years ago. After reading the advertisement, I prayed and sent the friend an email. She immediately responded and invited us over to their house that very night. They shared their adoption story and we were sold on moving forward.
The case manager for the adoption entity was on vacation at the time, but via text messages told me the first step was to get a profile book of pictures together and then we could meet with her in person on Monday to discuss more of the process.
Into the wee hours of the night Friday and most of the day Saturday I prayerfully worked on our profile book. Sunday January 19th I printed out the book, my family prayed over it together, and we got a text from the case manager telling us where to meet in the morning...a car rental place.
We had NO idea why she wanted us to meet her at a car rental place, but figured she must have some reason. So that Monday, on Martin Luther King Junior Day, we found ourselves sitting in our car, clutching our profile book in our sweaty palms.
Then out came the case manager and two of her employees.
She was holding an empty pink car seat.
She proceeded to explain to us that they were heading out to make a long road trip to pick up a baby girl and this baby girl needed a family. She wanted to know if she could take our profile book to show the birth mother.
My husband immediately and happily responded yes, while I stood there frozen and speechless.
We were so excited and so terrified all at once. She explained many things would have to fall into place and that there were many families interested, particularly because all the paperwork was done and literally the only piece left was to find her a family.
Monday morning we cautiously looked around Baby Gap and forced ourselves not to buy anything, because being parents was probably still a long way off in our assessment of the situation.
A few hours later, on Monday afternoon, we got a text. We read as we held our breath, "Well...how fast can you have your home study done?"
Thoughts began racing. "How fast can we have it done? What does that mean? Did her birth mother choose us?" So after another string of text messages we finally got the text that changed our lives.
"Yes, you were chosen."
My heart soared and sank at the same time. So much possibility for intense love and intense hurt. So many unanswered questions in front of us. How would we become parents so quickly? How would we get everything we needed in time when we didn't even own a diaper? How would we get our home study, which usually takes months to complete, done in 3 days? This was not what we had planned!
"In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord establishes his steps." Proverbs 16:9
Surely the Lord had established our family's steps. Our case manager told us the baby would be staying with a pediatrician and his family in a town near by. She told us we could call up the family and visit with the baby girl before we made our final decision.
As God would have it, this family wasn't just any family. This precious family had a mix of adopted and biological children and right before I made the phone call that Tuesday morning to this family that had this baby girl, I remembered why I recognized their name. I learned sign language in college and one summer when I was visiting with family friends, I learned of a little boy adopted from China. Because he was deaf, they wanted someone to sign with him at the family friends pool party. That little boy I signed with at a pool party 7 years ago was the son of THIS pediatrician.
God had all this in mind all those years ago. He put it on my heart to learn sign language, brought this little boy all the way from China to be with his family, put him and I at the same pool party, and now had placed this baby girl into his family's care. Absolutely mind blowing.
The family remembered me from signing with their son and they too were amazed by the providence of the Lord. They immediately invited us over to come meet the baby girl.
We rushed over to meet her.
And then it happened...
Time began to stand still, yet rush by.
Complete silence, yet deafening noise.
Total chaos, yet complete peace.
A rush of every emotion you can possibly imagine.
We were falling in complete love with this total stranger, yet this tiny human who we somehow already knew so intimately with every fiber of our being.
My husband Cory held her and stared at her with total adoration. I just knew I was watching him become a daddy in that very moment.
He was at complete peace...and I felt as if I was sweating blood. Until we began to pray.
We gathered together that evening with my parents, the pediatrician, and his family at their home. Eight adults and four children, some meeting for the first time that night. We surrounded this little girl on our knees and began to pray as if we had known this baby and known one another since the beginning of time.
That night I felt the Lord's presence stronger than I ever had in my entire life. There in that home, on our knees, we all wept over how humbled we were that God had entrusted this princess into our care.
There on my knees, clouded by my tears, I met my daughter.
I physically became the mother I had been in my heart all those years of waiting.
It was on my knees, after everyone had prayed but me, that I spoke my daughter's name over her for the very first time.......Liberty.
She was meant to be called Liberty.
For the way God had used her already to liberate us from our own expectations of how he works, of what being a parent would be like, of the way other's lives go, and free us to see that his way is always better, that he had a glorious plan in mind, and that all those times that looked and felt like failure He truly meant for good.
"There is no fear in love, for perfect love drives out all fear." 1 John 4:18
The next few days the whirlwind continued. God literally mapped out every step we took and everyone we knew sprang into action. We had people scrubbing our toilets, babyproofing our cabinets, dropping off diapers and clothes and wipes and car seats and strollers and baby things I didn't even know existed.
Our home study that could have taken months, took three days.
Our empty fridge became full with more meals than we could possibly eat.
My workplace, which could have been angry with my sudden request for a 12 week leave with less than 48 hours notice, literally rang out with tears of joy and ecstatic squeals and everyone went nuts buying us baby things and throwing us a huge baby shower the very next day.
Even complete strangers wanted to help in some way and rejoiced with us that we were bringing home our baby girl.
Then Friday, January 24th, exactly one week since I had stumbled on an advertisement that deeply stirred my heart, we brought our Liberty home.
I could never begin to explain the love that Cory and I have for Liberty. I could never begin to explain the gratitude we have in our hearts that her birth mother chose life and chose us to be her parents.
We look at her and know beyond a shadow of a doubt she was meant to be our daughter.
Her father's eyes and her mother's smile.
A countenance that soothes the aching and eyes that penetrate to the depths of your soul.
Constantly discovering new things about her, yet known so tenderly by her mommy and daddy since she was beginning to be formed in the womb of my heart.
Her daddy and I look at her, our family and friends look at her, complete strangers look at her and it all begins to reverberate to the core of my being...
God is faithful.
God is good.
God is merciful.
God always stands by his promises.
The Lord had been preparing our hearts for Liberty. In fact he was so detailed in his preparation that he had me write and publish to my blog a letter to my future children THE morning after she was born!
A few weeks after Liberty came to her forever home, our dear friends hosted another beautiful shower to welcome her. Although we knew the shower was happening, all the details of the shower were a complete surprise.
During some of the darkest times of our waiting, my mom and I had developed a bit of a secret code. She had begun to buy me little things with sparrows on them. She wanted me to have the sparrows to remind me that even in the darkest of times God's eye was on the sparrow and his eye was on me. The birds began to be this physical reminder that God was surely still watching and had not forgotten.
Well that day after Liberty's arrival, I walked into her baby shower and was surrounded by decorations and favors and cakes with mother and baby birds. No one planning the shower knew about the significance of the birds to me, but God knew.
He really had known and had his eye on me and on Cory and on Liberty all along.
Wherever you are this Mother's Day on your journey in life, whether a mother or father, married or single, rejoicing or mourning, content or deeply longing, I pray that Liberty's story is a reminder to us all of how faithful God really is.
Whatever you are going through, somehow God means it for good.
He means for it to bring you liberty from your own expectations and a deeper longing for His kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.
His eye is on the sparrow, and it is most definitely on you and I.
