God Keeps Meeting Our Needs - Part I

We are getting closer and closer to traveling to China and I was expecting to get more and more anxious as the time drew near for us to meet our boys. I am quite aware that we are taking on a really big challenge adopting two boys with significant medical special needs. I am genetically predisposed to being an anxious person and the details of that could fill another blog. If this was our first adoption, I know I would not be feeling this calm right now. Experience adopting is certainly a big help but an even larger reason for my relative calm is the knowledge that God has been meeting my family's and my children's needs over the last seven plus years. The many ways that God has lead me to the things that would best help my children has been quite amazing and that is what I want to share about in the next couple of posts.

Adopting children with special needs can be frightening and I know I would not have considered adopting Jacob and Levi if I thought Aaron and I were parenting them alone in our own power. The deal is that we are not going to be parenting them alone. God will be walking with us every step of the way if we invite Him to do so. What could be better than having the Creator of the universe and the Creator of my boys helping us with meeting their needs. Any of you who are parents already know just how challenging it is to parent almost any child. There is no child raising book that could possibly cover all the challenges that most kids will throw a parents way, unless you have been blessed with one of those easy going, parent pleasing children that are rare gift. Even those children can have issues pop up every so often that can confound even the best parents. Parenting is hard hard work that requires great wisdom if it is going to be done well and I won't even pretend to have gained the kind of wisdom I need to parent my children in my own knowledge. That is the great thing about parenting with God's help though, I don't need to be a perfect parent with all the answers and a level of patience to rival Mother Theresa. I am not alone and when issues pop up with my kids or myself for that matter, which they always do, and I am ready to throw up my hands and throw in the towel, I can hand those problems over to God and put him in charge of helping my kids or me. This may sound like a crazy idea, turning your kids issues over to God, but I can promise you that it works. You probably won't get an answer from a booming voice out of the clouds and you are also not likely to see the answer handwritten on the walls of your house but you can trust that God will help you in His perfect timing if you ask Him for help and are open to His guidance.

That perfect timing is the hardest thing for me to wait for. I am really not a patient person and I want problems fixed now or sooner. I don't like suffering or waiting or looking like a less than great parent because my kids are still working out an issue. God has blessed me these last seven years and allowed me to see how He has been working on my kids in His time and on me too. I think that is why I am not racked with anxiety right now because I am not in charge of meeting all of Jacob and Levi's needs. God knows exactly what they need and I know He will reveal and provide for those needs in His timing if I can just trust in Him. Over the next few posts, I will share more specifically how God has met some really big needs that my kids have had. These posts are just as much for me as for anyone else to read because I know I will need to be reminded over the next year and beyond that I am not alone when those big challenges arise.