"Are you done?"

Being a mother of 4 at the age of  31 was never my plan!  But, it was definitely the Lord's - but that's a whole other story! :)  Anyway, having 4 kids as close in age as we do, people are always, I guess, amazed, stunned, dumbfounded (insert your word of choice, here!), and they often jokingly ask,"So, are you done yet?"  Or the "bolder" ones say, "Don't you know what causes that?"  The answers are, "No" and "Oh, yes, we do, thanks," respectively.  Wait, did I just say, "NO, we are not done yet?!"  Here's how I know that the Lord is not done adding to our family yet. . . . (. . . and belive it or not, this is the short version!)

When I was 19, I spent a summer in China teaching English.  At that time I had been dating my husband for almost 4 years already, and we knew we were headed for marriage.  While in China, the Lord did MANY things in my heart, and it was definitely there that He planted the seed of adoption.  At one point after I got home, I said to Chann something like, "If you want to marry me, you are going to have to adopt a little girl from China one day," to which he quickly responded, "Okay." Fast forward 4 more years, we had been married for about a year and thought that we would wait a little while to have children, but we knew that it would take a while to adopt and began to think that we would pursue adoption first.  However, we learned 2 things: that we had to be 30 to adopt from China (I was only 23 and Chann 24 at that point), and that the Lord had other plans for our family - I soon found out I was pregnant with our first daughter!  Fast forward again 4 more years, and now we had three children!  Adoption was probably the furthest thing from our minds, so was another baby, but yep, here comes one more! :) 

After our fourth was born, the "Are you done yet?" question came more and more frequently.  Although we knew my body was done birthing babies, I simply could not say, "No" to this question.  So, adoption came up again.  We thought: yes, it's definitely something we want to do SOME day, when we have the money; when the other kids are older; when maybe I don't have to work . . . . the list goes on.  But, needless to say, we knew it was not in our near future. Then came Missions Sunday.  That night I went to listen to some of my friends talk about their summer mission trips.  I was overwhelmed with such an urgency to adopt NOW, so much so that I left with a migraine and had to have someone else drive me home!  Chann and I talked and prayed and decided that there was no way we could do this now - he was only working part-time, and Evy was just 6 months old!  The urgency eased, a little.  School started, life moved on, and adoption again became something we would get to at some point.  I was really okay with this.  We both knew the Lord had confirmed in our hearts that we would adopt, so now we just had to wait until the "right" time.