When A Wait is Good

One of my favorite verses in the Old Testament is Jeremiah 33:3--"Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." I don't profess to know all the reasons why this adoption has been such a rough journey for us. But a lot of good has come out of it too. Things that I didn't know but have become more clear as time moves on. The longer we've had to wait, the more comfortable we've become with adopting an older child. When we started this process, we said age 2 would be our age limit. Months and months went by, and we began to feel more excited about a child older than 2. Zenabu is almost 3 and a half (although I suspect he's closer to 4. It's hard to know because they don't mark birthdays the way we do in the United States). Another great thing that has come about is that I would do this again in a heartbeat. In 2 or 3 years, when Zenabu is 5 or 6, I can see us adopting a 4 or 5 year old. And if you had told me a few years ago that I would be at a point where I would be willing to adopt an older child from Ethiopia, I would have laughed in your face. But this journey--though hard and painful--has stretched and grown me in ways I never expected. Why wouldn't we do this again? Why wouldn't we adopt an older child? It's so exciting to wonder about what we don't yet know.