the hardest part

Today our family ate lunch with another family - pretty common stuff, we do this all the time.  Except this time, it wasn't so common... because this particular family also adopted domestically, just like we hope to do. 

It was so very good for my heart to sit at the lunch table with this sweet mother and her beautiful children (all three adopted).  I loved listening to her tell stories of the journey to each one of their children. 

She told me that this season - the waiting - is the hardest part.  Oh how I hope she is right!  This "waiting to match with a baby, waiting to bring a baby home, ready for a baby but no baby yet" is officially NOT EASY!  My flesh does not like it one little bit.  I do not want to wait.  I do not want to wonder.  I do not want to live in the not-knowing-ness of this season. 

But I do.  That's my reality right now.  It's our reality as a family. 

Yesterday morning Lydia asked if we could tear another link off our prayer chain (that we created for the baby we lost).  It's so hard for the kids to understand. 

We have been praying for a new baby for months and months.  Then we started praying for one specific baby and the "getting ready" got really serious (the girls got to go shopping for that little boy).  And then that baby did not come home with us.  But we still hope and pray that there is a new baby out there for us. 

I really wanted to tear another link off of that chain.  But I can't.  I don't know when we'll get a new baby.  It might be sooner than we think.  It might be much later than we hope.  And for now we seem stuck here, in the "hardest part".