The hole in the carpet

My sweet and precious Penny - the child of my heart... I am praying for your protection tonight.  I pray that I can kiss your sweet cheeks, whisper love and shower you with joy soon.  I am on my knees tonight, and in the days and nights to come.  I fear I will wear a hole in the carpet in front of the fireplace (the spot that I come to pray in the middle of the night when I wake up, knowing that God has called me from sleep to pray for you).  I think if we ever change out the carpet in this house, I may just ask to keep the spot of carpet in front of that fireplace and frame it - as a reminder of the power of the prayers of a mother who deeply wants to her children to be touched by the Spirit of the living God.  

I am so grateful for prayer - for now, it is the one way I know that God will nurture your spirit and strengthen all of us.  Kate prays for you at every meal, that you have enough to eat today - and I can't bare the thought of you being without when we are here with so much "stuff" and not feeling complete without you.  Trent prays that you will have a warm place to sleep and arms to hold you - and I am angry today, honestly, because each day that goes by is a day that I could be the arms to hold you.  So I pray and I grieve with you - your life is so small yet already has lived through pain and loss and I want to be there through it to hold you.  Oh, the wait is really hard today.

For the last four months, since we went on the waitlist with our adoption agency, I have been checking a clock that shows what month the agency is at, when matching families with their children.  For example, when we began in late May, the clock said that referrals were being given for families who submitted their dossier paperwork in August of '09.  We submitted our dossier in May of '10, so we knew we were looking at about a 8 or 9 month wait until we saw a picture of our Penny for the first time.  But that was assuming that the clock would move each month... that has not been the case.  The clock reads September '09 right now - which means that it could be as long as a year before we receive a referral and that was hard to stomach but I felt like I could trust that God has perfect timing and that it most likely meant that our daughter wasn't even at the orphanage yet.

Then I got an email from the agency today and it has thrown me an emotional curveball...  it read:

"What is really frustrating is knowing that if we had documents for all the children in the various child care centers right now - the adoption clocks would suddenly jump ahead literally by months!  Those children are sitting there, waiting for families to bring them home and love them."

And I am weeping - my heart aches knowing that children without homes are sitting in orphanages, just waiting on paperwork to be completed so that they may be matched with families.