“HURRY UP and WAIT“ & a FB post

HURRY UP and WAIT.  We saw a facebook post this week...

When I was stationed in Iraq with the US Army and had been there for about 10 months, it was my turn to go home for two weeks for “R&R”.  I do not recall if my family was expecting a certain day for me to arrive home or not, but I do recall that I arrived on time for my flight… and then it was postponed for hours, and then a day, and then after three days of relaxing on the warm concrete floor of a hanger, I was able to catch a flight home to see my family for two weeks before returning back to Iraq for another five months. It wasn’t a big deal. You learn to go with the flow when it’s fast and when it’s slow. Life is just like that sometimes. Yet, there is a reason that the army is known for the phrase, “Hurry up and wait.“  I’m sure there are many factors that go into it, and none of that really matters, so I am grateful that one of the skills I learned in my tenure with the military was to be relaxed when waiting.

Yesterday, my wife showed me a Facebook post from our adoption closed group. It had a picture of two girls and one boy: a sibling group of three children waiting for a family willing to take..… “so many children.”   As we understand it, most families want to adopt only one or two children. Maybe that’s because of the media mindset of the “American Dream” (A&D intentionally capitalized because our society has made it such)… one dream career, one spouse, one house, one boy, one girl, one or two dogs, a well groomed yard and a white picket fence.   Almost makes me ill thinking of it all.  Our life has been: one eternal spouse, a growing family with no specific limitations, making income where possible, learn and grow because that’s what life’s about, never saying no to opportunity, and calling any place we can reside and cherish each other our home....and the guinea pig was nice to have with us.  That’s OUR dream.  Anyway, the picture pricked the heart of my wife. I’m not sure how to describe what it did to my heart. Yet, I know I saw the picture and felt love.  I felt like I would happily take them into our home and call them my daughters and my son. And I felt that my family would easily do the same.

Apparently adoption is very different today than it was just decades ago. We have friends and acquaintances who have experiences when they went to an orphanage and said they would adopt this one now or they would adopt that one or both, and it was a done deal in a day or a weekend.  I’m not sure why the process is so lengthy now, but I like to believe that it is out of necessity to keep the children safe because human trafficking is so rampant in the world today. If that is the case, it is worth the wait. Our friends and family know us well, and the adoption agency has gotten to know us, but everyone else still needs to verify that we are who we say we are.  

So, whatever the reason is, here we are looking at a picture of three children in Haiti waiting to be adopted, and the organization not wanting to break the sibling group up. There’s more siblings in this world, and the agency says there’s a couple in the works right now through them. As we understand it, this one is an example. So, here we are, our hearts longing to bring our children home. We hurry and do our part as best we can by preparing our minds and lifestyle as well as that of our children and even our employees, and we wait.

Patiently waiting with open hearts and open arms.

Post-blog request: 

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The Hoggan's