I would love to say that a week in Florida gave us clarity and vision for adoption — but it didn’t. We returned home and waited for the call that was supposed to come before Christmas.

On New Years Eve, I got a Facebook message from Rondy, a pastor who is on staff with Ken at our church, asking if we would be interested in adopting from a Jamaican woman who was planning on giving her twins (due in May) up for adoption. Her home had been flooded in the May floods, and her husband had left her and gone to Ghana. She had a 5-year-old already, and wasn’t prepared to care for twins.

Then 30 minutes later, we got a call about an 8-year-old girl who needed a placement through DCS.

In less than an hour we went from discouraged to delighted. Our only problem? How to decide?

We had not considered infants before — mostly because infants aren’t generally “in need.” There are many people who will adopt infants, and the wait is usually long, and can be difficult and disappointing. But after all of the frightening stories we had heard about children in the foster care system during PATH training, and the situations we had encountered doing respite, the thought of adopting infants seemed refreshing.

We knew very little about the 8-year-old girl, but everything we knew, we loved. I’m sure she wasn’t perfect, but it seemed like a very good situation.

During the next few weeks, our phone became increasingly busy. We had a couple adoptive placement offers, but the placements involved children who we did not think we could parent, even though we had very few criteria. There were also respite calls that were likely going to be pre-adoptive — including one for a sibling group of four! Then we found a sibling group of two elementary aged boys who were with another agency, and were academically gifted, and we put in our home study to be considered for them. And one child in another region was being considered for transfer to our region so he could be placed in our home. How could we decide between all of these!?

We decided . . . not to decide. We decided to open doors, and let God close them. So we prayed that God would point us in the right direction, and cooperated with every process we were asked to participate in. Over the next few weeks, it became increasingly clear which door God was going to leave open.