When your babies are far away

It hit me like a ton of bricks the other night sitting in a camp with some of my ladies.

I had thought about it before, but not like this. My heart has broken again and again for these ladies as they are far from their children. Their stories about their children who don’t even remember who they are when they go home, who call an aunt or grandmother ‘mommy’ haunt me. Their reason to be here is purely for those children, who they are trying to provide for, and who will grow up without them. You can see it in their faces, you can see the physical toll that it takes on their bodies.

I have been struggling some lately with not knowing when our babies are coming home. I think about them and pray for them all of the time. I love them already more than I thought possible, even though it sounds crazy to love someone you don’t know- which is a whole other topic.

I have thought about how these ladies miss their babies, more than I can even imagine at this point. We love our kids so much already and don’t know them, but these ladies DO know their babies, they know what life is like with them, and now they have to try to do life without them, often for years at a time. I have thought about this before and how much greater their pain is than I can imagine, and how small mine is in comparison.

And then as I sat there it was like God smacked me with it. What if all of this- the waiting, the not knowing, the whole thing, is simply so that I can love these ladies more and gain the tiniest of perspective of where they are coming from. No, I will never fully understand it, and our lives will never be exactly the same, but to even just ‘get it’ in the smallest of ways.

I don’t want the waiting, I don’t want the unknown, but if this is what it takes for me to care more, to understand more, and to love more- then I want to be willing, because I want to love like that.

Update: We are currently waiting for our visas to come through for Pakistan, and we are waiting to for our I-600 A form to be approved (basically the form that applies for us to be approved as adoptive parents by the US government so that our child can have citizenship). We would really appreciate prayers on this as our home study was done here, and has been verified by a licensed American, but there are still so many unknowns! Thank you all for loving us and our baby/babies so well already!