Nothing That's Worthwhile Is Ever Easy

Have you ever deleted a document from your computer to only realize that a few days later that you still need said document and you now have to completely re-write the document from scratch? Or, have you ever deleted a post or several posts on Blogger thinking that the topic of discussion was no longer relevant and did not apply to your life only to find out several weeks later that yes it does?  I love Blogger, but there is a slight draw back to using it for those of us who like me rarely save my posts to draft before actually posting them.  I also do not write them in Word or any other word processing program and save them before posting them on Blogger. And, yes, I know as an editor that this is bad form.

You are probably wondering why does any of this matter. A few weeks ago, things with our adoption of a little girl from Albania went terribly wrong. So terribly, that the adoption process was ended. I am not going to go into details about what happened, but our hearts were broken.  The loss of our daughter was profound.  In order to begin dealing with the reality of the loss, I simply deleted any mention of the impending adoption from my blog, including all the posts related to the adoption.  The words were deleted, but the imprint that she had made on my life was not.

Several weeks passed, and I was still grieving. Rob and I were discussing possibly going with another agency and pursuing a child in Hungary or Lithuania, but nothing felt right. I could not go forward nor could I go back and change what had happened. I simply could not move on. I knew in my heart that THIS little girl in Albania was our daughter, and that no matter what happened I would always love her.  I could not even bring myself to speak about her in any other terms except for "my daughter."

I also had not been able to pray since the adoption had ended. I tried, but for once, the words would simply not come. For three weeks, the words would not come.  Then one morning, I was driving my usual 35 to 40 minute commute into work, and I began praying out loud.  I asked God to give me direction. I told Him that Rob and I were hurting, and that nothing felt right. I asked if there was any way to turn this situation around with our little girl to show us how. I told him what he already knew, which was that I had no idea what I was supposed to do.  And, then I went to work.

The next morning, I began checking my emails on my phone as I always do after I wake up. That's what you get when you use your cell phone as your daily alarm. In my email, there was a message from someone at our agency's home office - someone that knew us during our adoption of Yuli.  This person stated that she wanted to help us and knew that we belonged with a certain two year old little girl in Albania with dark brown curly hair and big brown eyes. She asked if we would be open to the possibility of beginning the process again with new people working on our case as she was starting the process to move our file to another branch. The door was opening...a door I thought was closed shut and sealed tight. I could not help but think of this verse: "The Lord will open doors that no man can close, and close doors that no man can open!" (Rev.3:8)

For the next five days, that verse was a part of my daily and sometimes hourly prayers. I asked repeatedly for the doors to remain open and for no man to be able to close them. On the fifth day, the phone call came. Our case had been officially switched to another branch and the agency was ready to proceed with the adoption if we were.  When Rob and I received the call, we were on our way to lunch in the car. I looked over at Rob and asked hesitantly if he wanted to move forward with the adoption using the new branch. He said, "Yes." 

And, in an instant, our world had changed. We were parents again to a sweet little Albanian girl.  It was almost too hard to believe, but it was real. Our little angel was going to be coming to home to the family that God had always planned for her to have. I still sit in awe at all that transpired to make this happen, especially in the tenacity of the one person at our agency's home office who fought so bravely and willingly for our daughter and for us. We will be forever grateful to her.

So the statement is true..."Nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy."  But, don't we always appreciate the things more that we have to work so hard for?

Oh, and about those deleted blog posts.....I think Lady MacBeth had it wrong when she said "What's done cannot be undone."  As you can see by looking at my blog, they are all here again even though I never saved a draft copy. With a little fortitude, I was able to find a cached copy of each post on the internet by googling the title of the post and a few words that I remembered from each entry. I copied the cached posts into a Word document and saved them to be added back to my blog when everything was more concrete. After that happened, I simply copied and pasted the deleted posts into my blog and added the original date of the entry to the post's title.  Simply put, Lady MacBeth did not count on Google. With Google, anything can be undone, even deleted blog posts!