Piecing Together the Past

We got a thought provoking email from someone on our Gaoming adoption group this week. She included a picture of a little girl who she thought might be our Hannah. She had visited the orphanage on a trip with Love Without Boundaries in 2007 as well as adopted a daughter from there. The picture that she sent us was one that I had seen when we first started looking for pictures of Hannah. It really looked a lot like her but it was a year old and it's hard to know with little ones. I eliminated the picture as our Hannah because the newsletter that contained it noted that this little girl was going to be adopted in China soon. Since that was in 2007, I thought surely this wasn't our girl.

Then, we got this picture again. We started really comparing every picture we had of our Hannah with this picture. More and more we started to think that this was, indeed, our Hannah. Little things like the way her left ear is more squared than rounded, her eyebrows are fuller at the outer edges, the shape of her eyes and nose. WOW! We can't be sure, but we really think this might be her.

Why do I make such a big deal about this picture? It shows me that God has been planning her to be in our family from the start. Another adoption might have fallen through in her past so that she could be waiting on us to find her. God sovereignly ordained her to be ready when we were. I am profoundly moved by this thought. She has been waiting an extra year or two for her family, because we were supposed to be her family. How great is our God! As we endure the next wait in our process, this will remind me again and again that God's timetable is the only one that matters.