Thursday, June 23, 2011

His mercies are new every morning

I am back from Ukraine and have nearly recovered from my 22 hour layover spent in the London air port. I am full of hope and potential and opportunity and I pray that it is contagious. There are many beautiful children who need families and I believe some of those families are yours.
While I will be writing more about those children in the up coming weeks, I wanted to share a bit with you about Nastia.
As you know, Nastia is the girl we were unable to bring home last year. She is seen in a group picture a couple of posts ago. You know that we love her.
while in Slavyansk, I was invited to visit the social worker responsible for the children in her town. She was still very disgusted with what transpired last year and shared with me that Nastia was still in the national adoption registry and was available for international adoption. She equipped me with some pertinent paperwork and with her blessing, I filed a request at the SDA to verify Nastia's status and ask for permission to immediately file paperwork. Lest you think I took this one in myself, Scott was aware of and approved of me taking these actions. I was told that I would receive word in about a week.
I can't tell you how excited I was to be doing this. This was not the purpose of my trip and just the ability to see her was a blessing. To find out that she was still available for adoption and that we would have the chance to try again was an awesome and unexpected gift, indeed!
I spent the last few days in Kiev meeting with other adoptive families, giving them encouragement and support. I got to spend time with the Houser family, adopting a little girl named Sveta, and I got to have a lunch with a woman named Natalie, who had just received paperwork for a blind referral to meet a little girl who was HIV+. She and her husband had not initially intended to adopt a child with HIV, so our meeting was especially opportune. I also spent Tuesday evening with a large crowd of families just arriving in Kiev as well as preparing to depart with their new children. It was so exciting.
We finally made it home Thursday night, I told my husband more about the paperwork filed for Nastia, and went to sleep dreaming about the good news I would hear the next week.
On Friday, when I finally got around to checking my email, I was excited to open an email from my new friend, Natalie. She had included a photo of her with the little girl who would be her daughter.

IT WAS NASTIA!

I was not expecting that. I had already begun to construct the God story that was happening. How glorious to share with you that we would bring home Nastia a year later. I had faced and understood that God had plans for her, reconciled that I may never know what her future was, but look, God was planning this all along!

God has other, grander, more perfect plans than mine.

He was not planning for me to be her mother, but He did let me have lunch with her mom.

I learned last year that with God, I am all in. I trust Him completely and know he loves me unconditionally. These again were not the plans I would have chosen, but I know that His ways are perfect. She will not grow up in an institution. She will not be transferred to internat when she is eight years old. She will have a mom and a dad who, to quote her new father, "will love her to pieces!" She will grow up learning how much Jesus loves her, because her parents will teach her this. She will have an older brother who is also from Ukraine.

She will know that SHE IS LOVED.

Jeremiah 29:11
'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.


I knew this promise to be true, even when I thought I would never know specifically His plan for her. God, in His mercy, pulled back the veil and let me see a glimpse of this promise to her.

7 comments:

Julia said...

Oh Traci. I am crying. I have had Nastia on my prayer list for a year now. I have been praying with you that God would open the door for you to go back and get her. God answered but not the way I/we prayed. I am so grateful that she is finally going to have a family. That is a major answer to prayer. I know you are so happy and so sad. I know too though that you gave her to the Lord a year ago with great mourning and here it is - a year later - and we CAN rejoice. I am going to pray that little girl HOME. Pray that nothing stands in the way for her to finally be free and clear. Rescued. I am so glad that God orchestrated a meeting for you. What peace that brings to you I am sure. God is good. Tender. Kind. Loving. And in reality - TWO LITTLE GIRLS are free. TWO.

beBOLDjen said...

Traci,

Your trust and reliance upon the Lord is a testimony to all of us. Your heart is BEAUTIFUL!

Holly said...

Wow.I can only begin to imagine the rush of feelings you must have experienced seeing that photo. I too am so blessed by your heart and your trust in the Lord, even when it just doesn't seem to make sense. I too am happy that she will be an orphan NO MORE and that Dasha found her way home as well.

Heather said...

I know what you mean when you say that with God, you are all in. It's not easy sometimes, and love in particular is messy. But it's worth it...it's always worth it. :)

By the way, Dasha is total cuteness overload. :)

Rick and Michelle said...

I so needed to read this post!! Just an hour or two after reading this, we found out that the two brothers we had fallen head over heels for have just been adopted by another family already. It feels a bit like a miscarriage (which I know all too well), but at the same time, our prayer had been for God to get them out of those orphanages asap. He answered our prayer, just not in the way we had hoped. Although I grieve "our loss", my heart is content knowing they are surrounded by the love of a family now. We are still willing to prepare for our Ukrainian adoption, although we don't yet know who God is going to bring into our family. That's where trusting in His perfect plan comes in. He is fully capable of revealing the right child(ren) at just the right time. Your post here spoke right to my heart. And God knew I needed to hear the "good news" JUST before I heard the "bad news". Thanks for sharing your story.

Mommy Grits said...

Traci!! This gave me chills! I have been meaning to ask you about Nastia. HOW AMAZING. Yes, His mercies are new every morning. Wow.

ksivey said...

Traci, what a beautiful blog, thank you so much for posting. My name is Kim, and my family has just started the process to adopt a beautiful 6-year-old boy from Ukraine. We found him through Reece's Rainbow, and I think you may have met him. I would be over-joyed to talk/write to you and find out if you know more about the sweet boy that we hope God will make our son. Please, please, please contact me: ksivey@gmail.com