Journey to Levi - Part II

If you missed the first part of our "Journey to Levi", you can read it here.

Over December, I just could not get Nicholas out of my head. I had found out that he would no longer be eligible for adoption when he turned 14 years old on this upcoming July 10^th, five days after my birthday. On Christmas morning, I woke up at 3 a.m. and could not go back to sleep. I ended up downstairs on the couch and was reading my Bible and praying. I had this overwhelming feeling of sadness and pain for Nicholas. It was a very odd and awful feeling that I have never had before. It actually felt like my heart was hurting for him but not really with a physical pain but with this deep spiritual pain. I actually took two Tylenol because it felt so terrible even though I knew it wouldn't help. I begged for God to take this crazy burden off my heart since God knew I would say yes to adopting Nicholas and give that pain to my dear husband if we were really meant to adopt Nicholas. After a couple hours, I was able to fall back asleep. I did have a really wonderful Christmas and I briefly mentioned to Aaron waking up and feeling sad about Nicholas but that was about it. The next morning, I woke up early again and I came downstairs and started reading a book my Mom had given to me at Christmas about Amy Carmichael, a missionary from India. Amy Carmichael described having this great pain in her heart for the people of India and I could totally relate to that feeling with what had happened the night before. As I was reading the book, I got this overwhelming feeling that Aaron really needed to see all the facts of this situation with Nicholas.


After Aaron got up and had his breakfast, I asked if we could discuss Nicholas and Aaron said that was o.k. but he wasn't excited about it. I asked if it would be alright with him if we wrote down all the reasons why we shouldn't adopt Nicholas and all the reasons why we should. We started with all the reasons why it would be a bad idea and then we wrote down all the reasons why we should. After reading all that we had written down together, Aaron said it was obvious what we should do and that it looked like we were suppose to adopt Nicholas. I was very very surprised and I asked Aaron several times if he wanted to think about it more or sleep on it. Aaron said no, he did not need to think about it more or sleep on it so that is how we came to the place of submitting our Letter of Intent (LOI) to adopt Nicholas.

I had been praying that God would show me this was really his plan and not just my crazy idea or that God would close the door if this would be too much for our family. Two days after submitting our LOI to adopt Nicholas, I went over to read new posts on the Love Without Boundaries blog. Well I just about fell out of my chair because there was a blog post about Nicholas and it talked about his younger foster brother and there was a picture of the two of them together. It was crazy because the younger foster brother in the picture was our Jacob. I was shocked because I had no clue that Jacob even had a foster brother living with him. I called Aaron and my Mom crying and they could not believe it either. Now I saw why I had been so burdened for Nicholas and why I could not get him out of my heart or my mother's for that matter. Here is the link to the blog post!

The name Nicholas was simply a screen name that LWB gave our son to protect his privacy and we have decided to give him the first name of Levi and keep his Chinese name for his middle name. Levi means joined or united and we feel this name is perfect considering how long our son has waited to be united or joined to a family of his own. Levi is joining a large family and everyone is so excited about meeting both him and Jacob. Nothing makes me happier than knowing that my two boys will never be without a family again!