Her name is written on the fabric of our family

Friday afternoon we got an email about some more changes regarding Ethiopian adoptions that may further delay us being able to bring home our little girl. We've gotten several of these bad news emails in the nearly 2 years we've been working towards this adoption, and you'd think we'd be immune by now, but the amount of panic and fear that one email can elicit really does amaze me! I think I'm a pretty positive, optimistic person typically, but something about these adoption emails just send me into a funk that lasts several hours.

This past Friday was no different, the fear and worry crept in. What if it takes a really long time before we can bring her home? What if something else changes and we never get to bring her home?

I tried to suppress the thoughts and go about everyday life, but it was really hard to keep from being distracted and depressed. We went out to dinner and it was the worst dining-out experience we've had in a long time. The restaurant was terrible, one child started feeling sick part-way through the meal, so I sat in the car with her, not wanting to risk her throwing up in the restaurant (She was fine by the time we got home, though, eagerly inquiring about what was for dessert!). Another child fell out of the bar stool type chair he was sitting in and the third child choked and gagged so bad on some food that the med students one table over were at attention ready to assist with a rescue if needed. He was fine and no Heimlich needed, very thankfully. The evening, however, was rather miserable.

My husband and I managed to get home and get the kids in bed, and I have to admit we were irritated with each other by this point. Probably in an unconscious attempt to put order to the few feet of this world I could control, I set about the cathartic task of cleaning out my craft/project closet (our under-the-stairs closet). I had let it get too messy and began pulling things out so I could purge and better organize it all. I got towards the back and then I saw them. The two Christmas stockings I'd bought off Ebay last summer.

We have matching Pottery Barn Christmas stockings for our 3 biological children, monogrammed with their names. They no longer sell the same style in the store, so to get a matching one for the child we are adopting I had to buy it off Ebay. The only ones I could find were a set of 2 already monogrammed. I bought them anyway because I knew I could remove the old name and get it monogrammed with a new one. When I got the stockings in the mail, I'd attempted to remove the old names myself but it was pretty hard, so I decided to just get the names removed by the monogrammer whenever we knew who our new child would be and could get the new name put on. So, the stockings got stuck pretty far back in that closet.
Until Friday night, nearly one year later, and now as I pulled them out of the closet the name on one of the stockings froze me!

Our Ethiopian daughter, who we were matched with 2 months ago (9 months after buying the stockings), has a rather long Ethiopian name (5 syllables). The first part of her name can be incorporated into a more commonly heard American name, which we plan to do, and then the last half of her name we are planning to use as her middle name, it makes up a very, very uncommon name here in the U.S. But guess what name was monogrammed on that stocking? The 2nd half of her Ethiopian name! Her American middle name!

What are the chances?!!!

I can't tell you the names right now because we haven't passed court, yet, but if I could you'd say zero chance. It is not a common name/spelling at all!!! Without God the chances of that stocking being monogrammed with that particular name has to be 0.00009% or something like that.

But, with God?

Matt 19:26, "Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

What a sweet reminder, just when we needed it so much, that God is all over this adoption, in even the tiniest detail. He wrote this particular little girl into the very fabric of our family long ago!