Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [30]
So the next day Steven called Bethany’s headquarters. We were sitting on the side of our bed, and I could hear his part of the conversation.
“I understand the law is that you can’t have more than two biological children at home, so I’m afraid we wouldn’t qualify,” he was saying. There was a pause. “Oh really?” he responded. “That’s interesting. Let me tell my wife.”
Steven put his hand over the phone and turned to me. “Sweetie,” he said, “get this. The Chinese government changed that law just last month! Now you can have four biological children at home.”
“You’re kidding!” I said.
But I had another card to play.
“Ask about the age of the kids they’re placing. They probably don’t have babies under the age of one.”
Steven was back on the phone. I heard the nice Bethany person talking, and then Steven said, “Oh really? Hold on for a second and let me tell my wife.
“The average age of the kids available for adoption used to be older,” he said to me, “but things have changed and now they’re placing children who are between six and ten months old.”
“Unbelievable,” I said. “Okay, ask her if they have any blond-haired, blue-eyed Chinese children!”
I’m sure the nice people at Bethany didn’t think much of my humor, but the surprising information did make me agree to at least pray seriously about adoption. Down deep, I really did want to be open for whatever God wanted us to do. I was just really, really scared of my abilities as an adoptive parent.
So we prayed regularly – but guaranteed, not as regularly as Emily Chapman – for God’s leading about the adoption decision.
Then Steven and I decided to spend one whole day together thinking about what God wanted us to do. We had a few errands to run and then it was off to lunch before a doctor’s appointment.
Everything we saw was Asian. We looked in the window of an antique store . . . everything was Chinese. An Asian clerk checked us out at Target.
“Hey,” Steven said, “if we were to end up adopting a child from China, we would be so old! We’d be like Abraham and Sarah. We’d have to find out what the Chinese name for ‘laughter’ is, so we could name our child like they did when God told them they were going to have Isaac in their old age.”
I laughed at him as I shut the car door to go into the restaurant. We knew absolutely no words in Chinese. I got a table and looked up when the waitress asked me what I would like to drink. Yes, she was Asian.
I had a doctor’s appointment right after lunch. I needed to get a possible infection on my ankle checked out. There were all kinds of magazines in the waiting room. Suddenly Steven said, “Mary Beth! You are not going to believe this! Look!”
He was reading a tattered Reader’s Digest and had opened it to an article about a Chinese couple who were desperate to find a cure for their little son’s heart problem. The story described the little boy, and then there was this line: “The boy they called Shao-Shao (pronounced Sho-Sho), meaning ‘laughter’ in Chinese, had a rare and very dangerous heart disease.”
Only an hour before, we had been asking what the Chinese word for “laughter” was, which is not exactly the sort of thing you wonder about every day. And now here we were in this doctor’s office, looking at an eight-month-old Reader’s Digest we otherwise would never have seen and reading the exact answer to our question.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I took the magazine and chucked it across the room.
A few minutes later I wasn’t particularly surprised when the doctor called me in, examined my ankle, and told me it wasn’t infected. I knew what God was up to: the ankle had just been the means to get us to read that old Reader’s Digest!
I realize this could have simply been a coincidence. But I was beginning to believe that God was nudging us down the road toward adoption, building my faith as He did so.
But I was also full of fear.
“What if I can’t do this?