Update On My Adoption.

Since I started talking about my adoption a long, long time ago here on this site, I thought you'd appreciate an update, which is now available over at One Roof | Africa.

If you want to track back over all the adoptive past, please read my old Dregs posts about it or read my family's story over at One Roof.

The Big News.

The familia is moving to Uganda, Africa, so that we can finally get our son to become part of the family. You can get the full story on our very new website: One Roof | Africa.

A Must-Read.

My wife doesn't update her blog often, but when she does, it's always worth reading. I encourage everyone to check out this post. Heartbreaking as it might be, it is a transcription of the letter she had to write to the attorney in Africa explaining why we had to forsake our adoption process.

The letter itself is written in a very African style, in Michelle's attempt to speak to the adoption attorneys in their own Ugandan variation of the English language. But the introduction she wrote is very much her own:

I never thought it would end this way. I woke up at 4 am with the grace to write the following letter out.

I am dedicating this post to birth mothers, who loved their children so much they chose to place them with families that could care for them better than they could. Who love so deeply they are willing to hurt the rest of their lives so that their children don't. I honor you women.

Goodbye, my sweet boy. I love you this much.

I admire her bravery in acknowledging and tending the emotional wounds she's sustained in the past few months. I admire her grace and poise in the grieving process. And I admire her willingness to share our story with the rest of the world.

To paraphrase an earlier post: Life goes on. God is good.

Blessings, Brave One.

Closing The Door.

(This is the full text of an email I sent most of my family and friends earlier today. If you didn't receive it, it's probably because I didn't think of you as I hurriedly assigned email addresses to it. Apologies. It wasn't an intentional slight.)

It is with a heavy heart and a devastated spirit that I write to you today. After months of prayer, counsel, soul-searching, and flat-out arguments with God, Michelle and I have decided to withdraw our adoption case and end that particular part of our lives. The longer we hold on to him, the more it becomes obvious that nothing's going to change in our case, and the more we endanger his chance of being adopted by someone else.

In the African system, once a child becomes five years old, he is pretty much destined to be an orphan for the rest of his life. Sterling is just about a year and a half away from that, and we don’t want to hold on to him at the expense of seeing him go to another family. We love him too much to keep him an orphan.

This has been a long time coming. The writing has been on the wall for months now, but we've refused to admit it or acknowledge it. In retrospect, that refusal has come out of fear rather than faith--we've been too emotionally tied to Sterling for too long, and were thus blinded to the truth and deaf to the voice of God. The reflexive action is to say, "But, but, but..." We've said that a million times. But we know we've done all that we can feasibly do, and the obstacles and roadblocks are still in place. There really is no more we can do at this point, and there hasn't been for some time, so at long last, we've finally come to a place of bewildered, shell-shocked peace and made the difficult decision we knew had to be made.

Still, there's an exhaustive relief to it. This has been a door in our lives that has been open for a long time, so it's painfully nice to be able to close that door and move on in whatever direction God would have us. No, it is not the conclusion we've been hoping for the last two and a half years, but it's a conclusion, and that is sufficient.

And in the end, we remain God's. We don't know why things shook out the way they did, we don't know why God called us to this task only to have it fall apart time and again. We don't know what we're going to tell our children, who have grown up for the last two and a half years talking about their brother Sterling. All we know is that God is faithful, that he is good, that he loves us, and that he loves Sterling more than we do. That boy is too, too precious to remain an orphan, and he's been watching all his friends at the orphanage get adopted out from underneath him. Now he is free to find a family; it just won't be ours.

Thank you so much for walking down this road with us in whatever capacity you did. Thank you for prayers, words of encouragement, financial blessings, and the countless other ways you supported the Palmer Tribe in the midst of our time as Sterling's family. It's going to take some time, grieving this loss, but we're confident that we'll come through the other side of it more in love with Jesus and more in love with each other. It's just the way God works.

May God extend his grace and peace to you in a tangible way today,

--Adam (and Michelle)

Two Years And Counting.

Today marks the second anniversary of our adoption process. Two years ago today we contacted Amani Baby Cottage for the first time to tell them we wanted to adopt from Uganda. Two years ago today we set out on this grand journey not knowing when it would be over. Two years.

We still didn't know who we were going to get; we told them we wanted a baby, and that we were pretty sure we wanted a boy (then-three-year-old Noah was certain, however--as we looked at their website gallery, he jumped up and down and said, "Let's buy a boy! Let's buy a boy!"). Little did we know that we would be saddled with a fifteen-month-old boy whom everyone said was the best kid in the orphanage, even though he didn't necessarily meet our parameters.

Two years. As I sit here thinking about it, writing about it, it seems almost like we've always been in the adoption process. We've had soaring highs, and crushing lows, and lots of median time in-between where we felt like we were simply treading water. And now, after two years, I go into Noah's room, and I see the extra bed we've had in there for 730 days or so, always ready to be filled at a moment's notice with his African brother, and I plead with God, "If you won't hear our prayers, please hear those of this little child who just wants his brother home. He just wants to buy a boy."

And in the meantime, we look forward to The Bean, and we carry on with our lives, and we contact our Congressmen and Senators and tug every possible governmental heartstring we can find, and we wait on God to move heaven and Earth and unite this family of ours.

The Latest On The Little Man.

As I mentioned in another post, our adoption has stalled in the Ugandan court system because of something like six little words in our ruling that need to be removed. We've been given a favorable ruling, but it contained wording that said, essentially, that we had to come back to Uganda in three years to finalize our adoption, and the US doesn't allow such conditions for adoptions. Until those words are removed, we're stuck in a (very long) holding pattern.

Well, we have some tangential good news. Because our entire case has been so screwy, the orphanage started taking their adoptions to another court located in Jinja, which is where the orphanage is located, instead of Kampala, which is the capital city of Uganda. So they had some favorable rulings through the Jinja court, which was good, but those rulings had the same wording ours did, which was bad.

Now in our case, we asked the judges to remove those words from the ruling, and they got very upset with us. In Jinja, however, the lawyer asked for the words to be removed, and the judge was kind about it and actually did it. So there are now two (I think--maybe three) adoptions going through. The rulings have been modified, and the kids are on their way home.

So I think this bodes well for us, in that I can't foresee the high court, who holds our case, wanting to be outdone by a lower court. Of course, I'm thinking logically, which is a mistake when it comes to the Ugandan government. These people love their children, to be sure, but have a difficult time seeing that it would be better for the orphans to be united with their families.

Please keep praying for our adoption. Pray that God would change the hearts of these judges. And pray against child trafficking, which is suddenly very rampant in East Africa, which is causing a lot of these judges to take extra caution in their rulings. And if you think about it, pray for the plane ticket(s) we'll eventually need to purchase to go pick up the little man once our adoption has been granted.

Happy Birthday, Sterling.

Nothing's changed on the adoption front, but I thought everyone would enjoy this photo of the little man. He turns three today. We were originally hoping to have him home before this day hit--we wanted to celebrate with him--but now we're just going to have to change that. Perhaps we should start hoping he's home before he turns four.

The Sterling Saga Continues.

As many of you know, Sterling is the African orphan whom we are adopting. We've been in the process of getting the lad for over a year now, and the story, long and convoluted as it has been, comes down to this: a month ago we got word from the Ugandan courts that they had ruled in our favor and granted us guardianship.

Now, this sounds well and good, but there's a hitch. In their ruling, the judges insisted that we come back to Uganda in three years to complete the adoption. We're fine with that (I guess), but the US isn't. Apparently, according to US International Adoption Policy, that won't fly. So the US isn't granting a visa to the little man, which means he can't come home.

So what can we do? We're appealing to the judges to reword their ruling, omitting the clause about completing the adoption in Uganda. Our lawyer presented this to two of the three judges on Wednesday, and was severely rebuffed, to the point of being threatened with a revocation of her license.

Yikes.

Anyway, our whole adoption hinges on these judges changing their ruling. If they don't, we won't be able to bring the little man home for another year and a half. If they do, we're good to go.

We should hear something soon. Until then, pray.

This Christmas, Hold the Ones You Love

Sterling is 2 1/2, and it looks like he'll be spending yet another Christmas without his family (i.e. us). Oh well. At least he has this photograph to hug.