I've been blogging with y'all here for over half a year and haven't once written about something very dear to my heart... Adoption.  I think of it daily, tell God my heart is available regularly, and last night even dreamt about it.

Actually, two things that have been on my mind came together in one Sweet little dream last night.  The first was adoption and the second was candy - we are, after all, still half comatose around here from our Valentine's sugar-fest.

In my dream I was flying home from China with the skinniest little Chinese boy you'd ever seen, seated on my lap.  A toddler by age, but a baby by weight.  I was holding his frail frame close and whispering tender words in his ear... aware that both my voice and language were completely new to him, but would one day be as familiar as that of a birth-mother.  

I was asking him what we should call him and said something like, "you're as skinny as a stick, maybe the boys will call you 'Stick',  because you look like a little fun-dip stick... but all you need is to be covered in sugar... and I know you're Brothers will be happy to oblige."

That's all there was, or at last all I remember.

But my first thoughts when I awoke were, "What a sweet dream, but if we adopt we're going to adopt a girl."  Immediately my heart was pricked by conviction.  And the Lord, who laid the desire to adopt upon my heart, asked me, "Who's plan do you want?"

It's a thought I've been working over regularly this past month, specifically as I think on adoption. After sensing God's Call to adopt, I've used words like, "we'll do it at this time, in that specific way, the child will be this or that, and so on..."  But am I willing to take up a Call that I don't have any specifics to?  Am I willing to lay down a little girl to pick up a boy with a cleft pallet or an older daughter who is only a year or two away from being released from a foreign orphanage, with the options of prostitution or slave labor staring her straight in the eye?

Who am I hoping to save when I say "Here I am, send me"?  Is my availability about me or a motherless child when I say "Dear Lord, this is exactly what I expect it all to look like"?

And so I don't know anything today, except I want to want what He has planned.  I don't yet, but I want to.  No matter what it looks like, or when it will be, or anything...

But I know God is getting my heart more fully than He had it before, and for that I am humbled and grateful.