Our Adoption Story Part 2

THE BIG NEWS-the long version

by Connie Clark Lindquist on Monday, 06 June 2011 at 08:18

Scott and i thought that we would let you all have time to get over all of the questions that we have gone over MANY MANY times such as the following:

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?????   Yes, haven't you ever read my posts? No, that is what i said to the Lord for three months or more when i felt prompted to do this over six months ago. Yet, every day He would bring along a word or a message or a writing or a song...He used MANY different ways to bring up adoption. I truly mean DAILY! Ask any of my girls! It became humorous but i never believed it was for real. I mean, seriously, haven't we had enough adventure the past two..i mean, five, i mean ten...twenty.... thirty....thirty-five years???  (i am a lot older than that but my adventures began when i was like....2 but i am still older than 37;})

WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU CHOOSE A CHILD WITH DOWN SYNDROME???

The girls, as usual, wanted another sibling WHILE we were in the hospital! It didn't stop either! I would always reply that the only way that i would have another child is if you promised me the child would have DS...weird....NO! For one thing, no one could ever promise me  that, right?  THEN...Have you met our Sophina??? No? than just ask her sisters or our PCA's!!! NO, i am NOT stupid! I DO remember all of the extra work! YES! I DO remember all of the issues....HELLO??? I LIVE with her DAILY issues all the time!

WHAT IN THE WORLD MADE YOU DECIDE TO ADOPT?

When God started convincing me that that was suppose to be what we were doing, in the back of my mind i knew that i was still fine because Scott would NEVER adopt! SO when the girls REALLY started in on me, i would just tell them that they didn't need to convince me, they would have to get their dad and there was NO WAY!

Enter the music of one Sunday which then went into Josh's sermon...his first and only Sunday morning Calvary sermon (so far), that knocked the air right out of me! The tears just flowed and i KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt that now i had to ACT and i was scared to death. It was STOP living in fear of what God is asking of you! (this wasn't an out of the blue response though...this was just the final kick that was needed) Was it that same day or was it that same week? Anyway,  i was on a blog of the only person at that time that i didn't know on my FB wall. I saw a -well, i don't know what they are called, but i thought it looked like it was about adoption of children with DS so i clicked on it. It opened the door to what you see all over my FB wall now. It was the Reece's Rainbow site. It was a site that was FULL of children with Down Syndrome that were in orphanages and baby houses. i sobbed and wept and cried and oooooohhhh'd at the pictures. I was hooked COMPLETELY!

One day i whispered to Alexandra, the strongest of adoption voices, that i knew that we were suppose to adopt then SHE got very vocal with her Daddy. She  called him and those who know Alex know that she HATES and i mean HATES the phone SO her Daddy knew that she was serious. She even wrote him a letter. Don't forget that he also was reading the same posts that some of you were, on my FB wall. Scott saw child after child needing a home. He also knew that it could have been his little angel and we both knew that Sophina would never have been adopted because she would have never made it through an orphanage life. She would have died.  Scott also heard the sermonS from the web and also from my FB posts. We were moved dramatically. At this time though, i had not a clue that Scott's heart was actually being moved at all.

I didn't know until he came home one time. Let me back up. I was convinced (as was Alex)that we were to adopt a little girl in Russia who was 4 1/2yrs old and she was soon going to be getting sent to the age 5-35 mental institution and never be allowed to be adopted again. Her name was....Constance and she was born in October (they have no idea what date, i checked) she has brown hair, brown eyes and she melted my heart and she grabbed Alex's and the other girls' hearts too. She was to be ours. Alex let Scott know what she was feeling about Constance and what i was feeling. Well, God had other plans. God used Constance to melt my husband's heart completely. He was justly angry at the ridiculousness of the thinking of the Eastern European countries of thinking that just because a child has DS they are considered worthless and treated sometimes worse than an animal. He saw pictures like i did. We watched Boy from Baby House 10.

SO.....when he came home one time, the girls literally met him at the door and asked if we could adopt Constance! There was MUCH discussion and the answer was yes a few days later. We told the agency that we wanted to adopt Constance. We had to email a bunch of information, which we did. They emailed back saying that they would contact Rus### and let us know. They did and they found out that there was some hard news. This region had never had anyone even try to adopt that had cancer, yes...the cancer that i just mentioned that had happened to Scott SIXTEEN years ago!!! They said that then knowing that the wife doesn't work outside the home and we homeschool plus have a child with DS already (which was normally a plus) there would be a very little chance of us being able to get her. We said yes anyway. THEN....i started thinking of sweet, precious Constance. WE would be her only hope of getting out of having to go to the orphanage! WHAT IF....they said no!?  We....i weep now just thinking of it...we would have been out of our minds heartbroken BUT SHE WOULD BE SENT TO AN ORPHANAGE FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE!!!!  I would sob when anyone touched me or looked at me tenderly during those days as we called to say that we just couldn't do it....even though, get what kind of man i am married to....my husband wanted to take on R**sia!!!  It was devastating! I WAS THE ONE THAT WAS TALKING SCOTT OUT OF IT!!! Amazing!!!Alex 'locked' herself away down in the basement curled up into a ball.

God is amazing in that HE knew exactly what He was doing! The very same day that we said NO another family started looking at Constance and they eventually said Yes, very shortly.  After they said yes to Constance, within just a couple weeks or less, the Russian agency let them know that the Baby House was not being allowed to keep Constance there for longer than 4 months unless they could get their dossier together by then!  The difference between this family and ours is that they have done this before, just last year, in fact. SO they not only are in the same location so paperwork can get done more quickly but they have also done this before so they know what they are doing and actually have a lot already ready!  WE WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ABLE TO HAVE SAVED CONSTANCE IN TIME!!!  There would have been no way to have done that in four months for us!  She then would have been sent to the mental institution for the rest of her life! GOD SAVED HER!

We 'retreated' is all i can say. It all became more real...more serious...more weighty... we went into our own thoughts again and i grieved BUT i continued to put the children on my FB wall AND i continued to look and pray and ask and listen. How could i ever love another little one on RR like we did Constance? Could we REALLY do this? Scott did likewise...except in Scott's way;}  It wasn't long before we were both discussing again and this time without the rose colored glasses on. We had seen more now, we knew more, we understood the cost more...not just financially either, we HAD to pray and then decide one way or the other and then be 100% FULLY COMMITTED to what we decided!

We had not even told family at this point due to the fact that we weren't sure ourselves yet and we didn't want to even go there unless we KNEW for sure. (although, Scott's mom KNEW about Constance as she called Scott and said, "Alright, are you getting a child from Ukraine or Russia...which one?" Oh how i LOVE her!!! When we told Grace, Scott's mom, it was a delightful response!  Grace has been on FB praying for each of these children right along with me! SHE just wrote last week that she wished that SHE could adopt 1 or 2 or 3!!! Do you see why i love her?  She has been a ROCK to me! A real blessing!

We have filled out so much paperwork that you would not even believe it unless you have done this yourself! I was feeling pretty overwhelmed since i would rather clean toilets all day then do paperwork and so i wrote on my chat group of other adopting families. They informed me that they were there for me and then they let me know that the next group of papers is even worse;}{  YUK!  BUT if this were your child...the one that you already have, and you were told that you had to fill out tons of paperwork and go through hoops and pay lots of money....would you do it??? Yep!

What does the Bible say?

The Bible says that He is the father to the fatherless. Nice verse that makes us feel better.  The Bible also says all throughout that we, as followers of Jesus Christ, are to take care of the widow and the orphan. Another nice verse. It also says that TRUE RELIGION is this....to care for the orphan and widow and to keep oneself unstained from the world.  The world is going to tell us all of the reasons that our flesh told us to say no for. We would be backed up 100% by almost all of you if we turned away and said NOT us...He couldn't mean us.  We have too much on our plate. Jesus is not One that goes with the flow usually.  Usually, God calls people to be unique, different, called apart, foreign to the rest of the world! Sadly, our decision will be foreign to a LOT of people when it should not be all that unique.  IF we say, again as Christians, that we are pro life then are we only pro life if it makes it hard for that woman to go through with the pregnancy or are we pro life when WE ARE CALLED to do the hard thing?

God also says in the Bible that we...WE ARE HIS BODY!!!!  WE are the one who He uses to bring these children into homes...no matter how hard it is!  We are the one who will stand before the Lord and have to answer as to how we spent our money, our time, our resources, our emotions, our......etc.... and when Scott and i BOTH looked at this decision from the human standpoint....the answer NO would win every time....BUT when we looked at it spiritually....how in the world could we forget what we were asked to do and just pretend and go on living the 'nice life'????  How could we say NO to what Christ was asking us to do????  I'm sorry but do you know what Christians in other parts of the world are being asked to do?????  NO EXCUSE for us!!!

I KNOW that this is VERY very long but i knew that some of you wanted the ....well, i was going to write the WHOLE picture but actually, this isn't even close!  I can't believe that i kept this to ourselves as much as we did for SO LONG but we did to protect ourselves from having too many that would tell us what we wanted to hear.  SO PLEASE do not feel bad if you didn't know because then that would be almost everyone we know feeling bad.  THIS was a VERY private decision!

SO i will ask that you support us wholly....if you haven't read the short story of all of this i ask that you please do because it asks what we are needing emotionally. Thanks to those of you who actually read this LONG letter....love to you, Connie