I don’t want to be misunderstood about my personal impressions of the adoption process on this side of the coin, or to ignore the other side of the situation where a loving mother is trying to find a place for her child- a child that she loves and wants to give them the world. After I posted yesterday a friend from my small group sent me the following message from her perspective as a birth mom.

“I was just reading the post technicalities. It’s very interesting to read from that side of the adoption process. One of the things that struck me was you described mothers sifting through books like car shopping. I guess I had never thought of it like that and can certainly understand why you might not feel “good enough” or want to be compared to other parents.

In my own experience giving up my son at 17, I also had to read through profiles and compared parents. Any number of them would have loved my little boy. But then, I ran across one profile that I was drawn to like a magnet. There was no other profile after that. I was not a woman of faith at that time, but looking back I have to believe it was a direct intervention on my son’s behalf. When I read this profile, I didn’t choose it because they had been waiting a long time or lived on a farm or had kids or didn’t have kids or any of the other general details of their lives. It wasn’t any of the details except this one….that they were very involved with the church and believed Jesus Christ was their savior. That is the sole reason I chose them. In fact, compared to everyone else (the one thing that you were expressing a fear about) these people shone like a bright star. These people lived their lives in such a way that they included that as a priority in describing themselves, not just passively mentioning they were Lutheran or something like that. That, even as a non-believer, was what I wanted for my son.

Interestingly, they told me at our first meeting that they worried they would not be good enough. And I don’t know if God guided my words or what, but I softly responded to them with tears in my eyes and said, “you have opened yourselves to give my little boy a good home, you are more than enough.”

I love this response it represents the care of a mom who knows that this is going to be a painful decision for the future of her life even if it was a good decision for the baby. It is interesting too that her chosen family felt inadequate to ever be “good enough” for this gift. We feel the same way- how can we ever be deserving of such a gift? Who are we that we deserve to be given a life? Maybe that is where the dislike of comparison shopping comes in for me- would we ever be chosen? Ultimately, I believe that my friend was drawn to that profile by the Holy Spirit and that he had that particular family picked out for that child.

In the next few posts I will share a little about our adoption experience that failed as well as our trip through matching with embryo families and the Holy Spirit’s work in divinely creating families.