Friday, January 21, 2011

Goodbye, precious little boy!

Today we said goodbye to our precious little eight year old boy. It was not meant to be. Although we never met him in person, we know a lot about him and have seen pictures of him and his beautiful smile. He will always be with us in our hearts.

We received a call from CPS this afternoon, letting us know that the decision had been made to leave him in his current foster placement and that they would be adopting him. Obviously, this is definitely what is best for him. Unfortunately, this decision should have been made months ago before the adoption process was begun outside of the foster family.

CPS never meant to put us in this position or to hurt our children (Suzy took it really, really hard). Mistakes happen and we were caught in the middle. We do not believe that anything happens by chance, so obviously, God has a great plan in mind. I was tearful when I talked with CPS (but somehow managed to keep it together while we were on the phone). This CPS office is already taking steps to make sure that what happened to us will never happen to another family. We also are now more knowledgeable (as well as our adoption agency) and we will also make sure that this never happens to us again.

I called our adoption agency to let them know that we had received the call (they already knew what the decision was, but CPS wanted to be the one to make the call as they were ones that needed to apologize and answer our questions). I was tearful with our adoption agency representative as well, but still managed to keep it together. She did tell me that she had already received a call from the CPS office that we had been working with about another possible placement. The CPS office and our adoption agency are going to give us some time to recuperate and then we will make a decision as a couple if we want to do this again.

Through this experience we have felt God's protecting arms around us, and have definitely felt all of the prayers that we received about this situation. I am really upset about putting our children through this, and CPS is also upset about that. We never get our children or family members involved until we are at a spot where there is no going back on our part or CPS. This was just something that happened because a step was missed in the process. We do take great comfort in knowing that this little boy is where he really wanted to be.

Mark and I are at peace with this. I had already made the decision yesterday to move on by scheduling our quarterly home visit with our adoption agency for next week. They are required to be out for a visit within 7 days of new placement, so we had cancelled ours in February, since we were anticipating that he would be moving in the next three-four weeks. This will also give us a chance for us to sit down and de-brief the events of this week as well as discussing what our next step is going to be.

We cling to our life verse; Jeremiah 29:11 "For I know the plans I have for you", declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future".

To quote my husband's tweet earlier today: "If I didn't serve a sovereign God, I would be angry right now". So thankful that we serve a sovereign God.

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