Still haven't heard from the adoption agency.
This is not a good sign. It means either that the adoption agency vastly underestimates the time they take to process any paperwork, or that we are not a viable candidate for adoption, and they can tell that simply from our application.
Maybe my application got lost in the mail. Maybe it needed two stamps, and I'll find it today in our mailbox, unopened and sternly marked by the local post office.
Okay, I just called them and everything is fine. We are in the program and setting up a time for our first meeting.
She recommended beginning the process with American Adoptions at the same time- they're the placement agency.
I was considering simply doing one thing at a time; finalizing the homestudy, and then beginning with American Adoption, but I guess we'd better do both. Oh boy.
I read this from Rohr's Daily Meditations this morning:
"After the first levels of enlargement, connection or union, and some degree of emancipation, mystical experiences lead to a kind of foundational optimism. You would usually call it hope. You wonder where it comes from, especially in the middle of all these terrible things that are happening in the world. Hope is not logical, but a "participation in the very life of God" (just like faith and love, which were called "the theological virtues”)."
That is a much better description of what I was attempting to articulate yesterday- that kind of foundational optimism.
It does feel like a "participation in the very life of God," which is a mystery. There's no complete explanation for God or for the way He works and redeems and brings forth life.
Instead of attempting to explain it or His method or His timeline, one simply rests in Him, in His life.
I frequently remember that verse from Isaiah: "Let that vine cling to Me."
And boy, do I ever.
Last night I was reading in Job, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. I always want to see God, and so I am often rifling through the Scriptures, looking for little glimpses and I got caught up in that particular section.
It was like a train wreck. It was terrifying. I couldn't tell what the writers were talking about, half the time. The wisdom was so ancient, and repetitive and punitive.
In desperation, I flipped to the first chapter of John, and immediately the poetry of those lines were like waves on a beach, waves of deep, inexplicable peace:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And then, I got to the part where John the Baptist stands there, in the crowd and he sees Jesus, and he cries out:
"Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"
Oh my goodness. I heard that cry in a way I had not before, and worship and adoration just washed through me, beyond words.
After all that I had read in what seemed to me the ominous and relentless Old Testament, it was as though I saw Jesus, and knew Him all over again, only deeper, and with a profound sense of recognition and wonder and adoration.
So come to think of it, I guess I did get a glimpse of Him after all.
