Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [31]
I’d seen Cinderella a million times. I could just see myself in the evil stepmother role. I felt like I couldn’t possibly love an adopted child as much as our other kids.
But then I’d think about what it might be like to be an abandoned child in China, living in an orphanage. Let’s see . . . was it better for an innocent little girl to have no mom, or a loving family and a halfway okay, half-crazy mom?
Meanwhile, Steven gathered Emily, Caleb, and Will together. “Okay, listen up. We’re gonna head down the road to adoption” – he was interrupted by wild cheers – “but you know that on every road there are detours. We don’t know if this road will end with us actually getting a little girl from China, but it’s the road we’re heading down.”
This image helped me a lot. It captured my faith journey at that time. As you know, for many of the events in my life I’d made plans and barreled toward what I wanted. With this big life decision . . . sure, we wanted (I think) the outcome to be that we’d adopt a little girl from China. But I felt like I was making that journey one little step at a time, walking each step God showed me to walk, not taking matters into my own hands and churning toward where I wanted to go. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I was conflicted and chose to believe that being conflicted was right where I needed to be in order for my faith to be put into action.
For the first time in my life, I began to learn to live the verse from Psalm 119:105 – “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.”
“God!” I prayed. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a journey where I really needed faith before. I could always see the path just fine. But with this, I truly don’t know where the road will lead. I can only see enough by Your light to take the next little step. And the next . . . ”
“I’m willing to do this, Lord,” I prayed. “But I’m scared!”
I was scared I’d be the evil stepmother. I was scared that I was too unbalanced to handle another child on top of the challenges of Steven’s crazy tour schedule. I could see in my mind how the implications of this would play out over a lifetime.
I was scared that life the way I knew it was over, and I didn’t like not knowing what was coming. Many, many nights my husband would just hold me in our bed as I sobbed and tears of fear ran down my face, dribbling into my ears.
The one good thing in my favor through all this was that I’ve always been a champion at paperwork, and the beginning stages of adoption are all about paperwork. I filled out all our forms and tracked down our certified birth certificates, marriage certificate, and all kinds of other certificates. We had background checks and fingerprints done.
So in May 1999 we finished our adoption dossier, including our home study and everything else in our paperwork pile, which made up one fat stack of papers. After getting every kind of notarization, state seal, and government authentication, I felt like I’d followed God’s path step by step, and now all I was supposed to do was wait.
We didn’t have to wait long. The following January, we received our referral from Bethany. This was the packet that gave us a picture of our child-to-be and what little information existed about her health, birth, and abandonment. There was also the acceptance letter . . . which we had to sign within forty-eight hours of receiving it to say that yes, we will adopt this child.
The agency had sent me the picture electronically, and as I downloaded it, my stomach was in a knot. Back then downloads were so slow because of dial-up speed. Finally the photo opened on our computer screen while Steven and I held our breath. Little by little, our new daughter’s face appeared.
Her name was Chang Yan Yan, from Hunan Province. Chang was her surname, but in China they always put that first. Yan Yan was her first name. It meant “doubly adorable.” The photo was basically a chubby little Chinese face swaddled in blankets, but I thought she was the