A Crisis of Faith

Thank you again for all of your support and prayers and emails and blog comments!!!! It means the world to us to have such strong support back home. We have felt your prayers lifting up our spirits and giving us new hope and refreshment and we have felt God moving in our hearts to reconfirm for us that these two boys are our sons. We still desperately need your prayers because we still have a long road ahead of us but we are certain that this is the road we are meant to travel. I (Jaclyn) want to share more detail about what has been going on so that you can have a better idea of how to pray specifically and so that you can better understand what we are facing.

First let me share what has been going on with me. When we started this whole process, we were both confident that God would lead us to our children and that we would feel a connection with them when we met them. Well, God was faithful and he did lead us to our children and we did feel that connection when we first met them and as we continued to meet with them. Unfortunately, I had an expectation that I didn't even realize I was holding onto. I expected to feel an initial connection and then to have that connection grow more and more each day. I knew that there would be hard times and that there would even be times that I felt that parenting was an impossible task but I expected to have this strong connection to fall back on. I never expected to doubt whether these were our kids or not. I expected to always FEEL that these are my children. Unfortunately, when things started to get difficult, my feelings about the situation changed and I took this as an indication that we had made a mistake. I had a crisis of faith and I forgot the past. I forgot about all of the miracles that we experienced along the way. I forgot about all the many times we saw God's face and felt his hands and heard his voice. I doubted our calling because of this expectation that I would always FEEL that these are my kids. What I had neglected to remember is that we are still in the process of bonding with our children. We are still almost strangers to them and them to us and creating a good strong lasting bond doesn't happen overnight or even over three weeks of seeing our kids for only two or three hours a day. We are still in the very beginning stages of bonding with our children and that means that I need to give myself, as well as them, time to adjust and time enough to really form these family attachments.

That's what's been going on with me but I am also seeing with new eyes what has been going on with Alex. Again, I had an expectation that ended up tripping me up. I was expecting the transition from the Baby House to our apartment to be difficult and when it wasn't I assumed that meant that Alex was doing good and that he would continue to do well. When things started deteriorating I thought he was just being obstinate and then when things got totally out of control I freaked out because I felt like this was never going to get any better and that Alex was just going to keep spiralling out of control. What I now see is that he is a very fragile little boy who is having a lot of conflicting emotions and a lot of change in his life and he doesn't know how to control his emotions. What he needs is a firm but gentle hand from people who are protecting him and assuring him that everything is going to be okay. What he got from us was anger, irritation, confusion and desperation. Thankfully, talking with our case worker, my mom and Ben & Janine gave us some new perspectives and new hope for the future.

So, we have turned a corner. This doesn't mean that things have gotten very much easier but we have some new tools in our parental tool belt and we are looking at the situation with fresh eyes. We could use prayer for the ability to successfully communicate to Alex that we are safe people for him; for Alex to be able to start to trust us; for Ethan to be able to understand why he isn't living with us yet when Alex is; for us to be able to build a good foundation for Alex so that when we do take custody of Ethan it isn't as stressful; for us to be able to pour out our love on Ethan and each give him some one on one time; and most of all for our sanity as we continue to live here in Kaz for three more weeks. Thanks again everyone, we love and miss all of our family and friends and desperately long to be back in the good 'ole US of A.