Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [39]
Jan was teary and thrilled all at once. She and Geoff had talked about adopting again, but all this information was a little sudden for her. Geoff was looking down, shaking his head, and grinning. Steven and I were beside ourselves.
It was a beautiful day, so – since we were all getting a little too emotional for the restaurant – we decided to take our conversation outside to the grassy area in front of our cars.
We talked some more and prayed, and then, after lots of hugs and jumping up and down, I handed them the papers and we quoted one of our favorite movie lines from That Thing You Do: “Okay! I’m signing, you’re signing, we’re all signing!”
As the Chinese proverb says, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In our case it was about eight thousand miles, but the journey to bring home Ashley Rose Moore and Stevey Joy Chapman began as we laughed and cried and signed our paperwork in front of that little home-cookin’ restaurant.
As our kids at home prepared for our new arrival, the reality of a new sister was setting in with Caleb and Will. Shaoey’s first year with us had been filled with broken sleep and screams from night terrors. So the boys really wanted a low-maintenance, happier sister who would have no problems sleeping through the night, and they decided it would be good to pray fervently for a chilled-out Chinese baby.
Then we began to hear about a weird viral epidemic in China, something called severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The World Health Organization was picking up reports of an outbreak of deaths from a highly contagious, flu-like virus. The Chinese government wasn’t revealing much, so news reports were pretty vague.
China is huge, I thought, and it has like two billion people, andthey’re saying that a few hundred have died. How bad can thisSARS thing be?
I was trying to convince myself that this wouldn’t affect Chinese adoptions. But deep in my heart I began to suspect that this could be a problem. I began to pray and hope that we would travel as planned, and to fret that we would not.
Our referral packet arrived from Bethany Christian Services in early March 2003. We were thrilled with Stevey Joy (aka Chen Bi Ru), but her photo looked pretty pitiful. She was tiny – 1.7 kilos (3.7 pounds). She’d been found outside a police station in a cardboard box, carefully wrapped in a man’s suit jacket. Her report went on to read that she had IVs for various things and that the people in the orphanage were concerned about her, even though she was officially listed as “healthy” rather than “special needs.”
Though the orphanage had evidently tried some traditional Chinese medicines to fatten her up, Stevey Joy’s little picture was of a pasty white, sad, tiny girl who desperately needed a mom to come get her. Caleb and Will continued to pray diligently that she’d be a chilled-out kid.
While we waited for word from Bethany about when we could leave for China, I got four visas for Steven and me and Jan and Geoff. All we needed now were our official travel letters from the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the rumblings about SARS were getting louder. The virus was lethal, fast, and extremely contagious.
One evening shortly after receiving our referrals, Steven and I were at the Moores’ home, talking about life and wondering if SARS would affect our travel plans. We joked, dreamed, and reflected back on our journey together. Geoff and Jan had been the first people we told when we were pregnant with our Emily . . . and now here we were, hopefully adding to both our families again. Jan told us how she was going to paint their master bedroom the next day. She wanted to get home projects out of the way before the adoption.
All I kept thinking was that SARS just could not stop our adoption arrangements. I had a plan, and nothing was going to get in my way. But, true to the way He so often seems to deal with me, God wasn’t running the world – or writing my story – according