My journal contains the overspill of my heart, my prayers, my questions, fears, and joys. If you could read my journal entries from four or more years ago, you would probably come away believing that adoption was just never going to happen for our family.

You would have read about the times we helped other families who were adopting, whether financially, or emotionally. You would have seen the thread of adoption woven through my extended family as we welcomed in nieces adopted through the foster care system, and new three new siblings, adopted through foster care and domestic infant adoption. You would have known that adoption was important to us, and that we felt strongly our calling to support families who were living that calling.

You might have noticed when my heart started to question whether or not our family would adopt one day… and you would have not blinked an eye because when there are so many others around you adopting, and when you yourself have seen the pain and joy firsthand, it’s a question that becomes a part of who you are. Some are called. Would we be called?

You eye would have caught the date I highlighted… the day when I, while praying for another family walking through their own adoption process, clearly heard the Lord speak to me, and that His words spoke of our family growing in a way I didn’t see coming. You would have noticed the handwriting become more jagged as the words of promise tumbled from God to me and spilled onto the paper. You would have seen the dates slide by, days in which I continued to seek the Lord and his wisdom, especially when it came to approaching my husband about this topic.

Six months would pass where my words would stay hidden on paper, where my heart was being held by my Father while He prepared me for what was to come.

There would have come a day when I recounted the conversation, that first conversation, in which I shared my heart with my husband, and what I felt the Lord was calling us to, and the disappointment when he didn’t immediately jump on board with a “Yes!”. The days, weeks, and months following would show evidence of how God wanted me to learn to trust Him and His timing; that He was the Grand Designer of this work in progress, and it was all going exactly according to his plan.

The conversations between me and praying friends made it onto the pages of my well-worn journal. The hopes for the future, the desire to walk God’s calling for us, but knowing that unless my husband and I were in complete unity, it couldn’t be a walk we would be blessed by.

The sweet day when my heart thumped a bit off kilter would have shown up on the paper as you turned the pages… the day when the two of us really talked about what we knew needed to happen in our family before we could pursue adoption. The things we knew the Lord had for us before we could start the journey. The fact that our hearts were both open, but waiting, waiting for the “Yes!” to happen from the Lord.

And then, one day…

It happened.

Unity. Perfect unity. A triple strand tightly woven together consisting of me, my husband, and the One who first planted the seed in my heart.

We looked at each other and we knew – it was time, and a few weeks later, we were matched, but that’s a tale for another time.

All that time I had been waiting for our story to start, waiting for the first precious words to be written, but as it turned out, He was already putting pen to paper and creating something beautiful… my journal is the proof I have when the memories start to fade, proof of the ways in which he used the waiting as a time of refining me to be who I needed to be in order to be Julianne’s mama.

If, perhaps, you’re wearing the shoes I wore for what seemed like an eternity, trust this…

God really, truly does write the best stories, yours included.