Waiting

In a pregnancy, you wait 40 weeks - about nine months. It’s a pretty consistent time frame (give or take a couple of weeks) based on biology and human gestation.  As the time progresses, mom’s physical changes remind you that you are getting closer and close to the arrival of the new little one. Adoption, however, is different.

Waiting in an adoption is quite uncertain. This week, we received a notice from our adoption agency that average wait times have been extended for adoptions in Ethiopia. That is a little discouraging – although the wait time at this point still seems so far out that it does not fully hit home.

By the end of the week, we hope to have our next round of paperwork complete. Then we will begin a process of more waiting.

Waiting this year takes on an even deeper meaning for me as we move through Advent. Historically, the church has celebrated the weeks of the four Sundays before Christmas as the time of Advent – waiting, expectation of the arrival of Christ. While this is typically the season for Christmas shopping and parties and cookie exchanges, in the church it reminds us of two periods of waiting.

For centuries, the Jewish people waited for the Advent of the Messiah. When we read the Christmas story in Luke 2, we most often stop reading at verse 20, with Mary “pondering these things in here heart” and the shepherds returning to their fields giving glory to God. The next few verses tell us, however, that on the eighth day after his birth, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the temple where he was circumcised according to the Law. At the temple we meet two others – Simeon, a righteous and devout man, and Anna, a prophetess. Simeon is described as one “waiting for the consolation of Israel.” Seeing Jesus, Simeon holds him in his arms and blesses him, declaring the words of Isaiah that he shall be the light of revelation to the nations. Anna too, has been waiting, having been in the temple ever since the death of her husband decades before. Together they give us a visible picture of the waiting, hoping, and expectation of Israel.

Now, some 2,000 years after the birth of Christ, people of God are again waiting – waiting for the second advent of Christ. We long for the redemptive work begun by God to be complete. When every tear will be dried, every wrong made right and death will be no more.

As we wait for this new little one to someday join our family, it feels like a long wait, (and yet two years wait for this person to join our “forever family” may not be so long).   As we do so, we long for two things. First, may the home we provide be one small step in the redemptive work of God. Orphans exist because the world is broken. Whether through disease, disaster, or simply the overwhelming circumstance of poverty, our little one is without parents. Every orphan heart knows intimately the longing for tears to be wiped dry, justice to occur and death to be no more. May our home be a small taste of redemption in that journey. Secondly, we simply long for this little one, whoever they may be, whether they have even been born yet, to join our family. 

As we listen to our various Christmas albums this winter, I find myself drawn to two songs on the Christmas album, Dawn of Grace, by Six Pence None the Richer. The first of which is the song Some Children See Him, a beautiful reminder of how children around the world see Jesus through their own eyes and culture. May our own child see and know Jesus through their Ethiopian eyes.  The second is the song, The Last Christmas.  Written from the perspective of an expecting mother, this is a touching song about longing for the arrival of a little one, relating to Mary, and knowing that their own child will soon join them for the celebrations of Christmas’s to come. For us, we don’t know if this will be the last Christmas without our little one or not. We certainly hope that it might be the last Christmas without this member of our family. But perhaps next year we will still sing that song, with even deeper feeling.

Until then, like Simeon and Anna, like the church for 2000 years, like many others in the journey of adoption, we will wait and pray.