The biggest challenge for me since we picked up Joshua from the Philippines has been my health. Just a short time before we were matched with him I was diagnosed with Hashimotos disease, which is an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid. I also developed Leaky Gut Syndrome which caused me to become allergic to almost 90% of all the foods I had been eating. It was quite a challenge for me in the beginning, but I am now at a point where I am feeling really good and have adjusted well to a whole new way of eating and preparing my food so I am almost symptom free. I wish my disease was only a physical challenge, unfortunately it has also affected our ability to adopt a healthy child from the Philippines. While we were waiting for Joshua, the adoption board in the Philippines came up with a whole new set of requirements for potential applicants in order to eliminate some of them to shorten the waiting times. One of the new requirements was that you could not have any autoimmune disease, with no exceptions. This was pretty disappointing and discouraging for me, especially since I knew we were suppose to adopt from the Philippines again.
I decided to do some research to see if we could at least submit a dossier and see if the Philippines would accept my condition since I really have no symptoms as long as I take my medication. We found a wonderful agency(Hand in Hand) that has been amazing to work with. They advised me not to go that route, because we would have to spend quite a bit of money to begin with and might end up being denied and all the money we spent we could not get back. They advised me instead to look into adopting a child with special needs. They said that in many cases the adoption board in the Philippines will make exceptions to their requirements for parents willing to adopt a special needs child or sibling group because they are harder to place. I knew that somehow the Lord would open the way for this adoption to happen, I just never would have guessed that this would be the path we would need to take.
We had looked at the special needs list before and knew that it would be a challenge to find a child that we felt confident and comfortable with parenting. A lot of the children on those lists have quite a number of challenges. I strongly believe that every child deserves a family, but I just never saw myself as being qualified enough to parent a child with special needs. We decided to trust in the Lord and asked to be put on the email list to start receiving the waiting child lists as they came out each month, hoping and praying that we would be led to know which little girl was meant for us.
Sometimes I wonder if the Lord gave me my disease so we would be led to consider a special needs child. As hard as it has been to have to face the health problems I have had, I am so thankful to have had them because they are what has led us on the right path to finding our daughter. The interesting thing about all of this is, a couple years ago, when I was at my worst and had become so sick that I reached a point where I honestly thought I was going to die, it was the knowledge that I had of our daughter I knew we would one day adopt that kept me going. I woke up every morning thinking that I had to get better because I knew we had a little girl out there somewhere who was relying on us to find her. I knew the Lord was not finished with me yet, and that I had to be alive to be a mother to this special little girl. That knowledge is what gave me peace and strength to get through my toughest days. She got me through my greatest challenge so far in this life and now I am going to have the opportunity to help her with her challenges. Although the thought of adopting a child with special needs is intimidating, I know that the Lord will be there to help us every step of the way.
One of the benefits of adopting a child with special needs is that, once you find them, the whole process is much quicker than that of adopting a healthy child. The whole process to get Joshua took almost 4 years. The entire process for a special needs child is less than a year. It will just be a matter of getting all the paperwork done and waiting for it all to get processed. I am so excited that we will hopefully soon be finding out who our daughter is and that we will have the incredible opportunity of being parents to such a special child. I'll admit that I am a little scared also, but I have no doubt that whom the Lord calls He also qualifies and we will be given the ability to parent whoever it is that He has chosen for us.
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