Pain and Joy - That is Adoption

"It is with great pain that you let her go, and it is with great joy that we receive her."

This is one of the lines from the letter that I am currently writing to Peaches' birth mom.  A letter that we will give her when we meet her on February 28th, 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  This is a very difficult letter to write.  A letter in which we want to share all of our hearts' desires toward this little girl.  So, how can you encapsulate in a letter what you would want someone to tell you if they were going to take your 4 yr old child halfway across the world?  How can a letter express all that God has brought us through in the last year?  As we look at Peaches' picture, there is nothing that can hold us back from bringing her into our family and pouring our love upon her life.  We know that through a miracle she will become one of us, as though it is blood that his holding us together.  How can this be expressed in a letter to her birth mom who through some difficult circumstance had to relinquish her little girl?

And so, I write, and delete, and write, and change, and write, and read, and re-read, and write.....and pray that God would give the words to assure this birth mom that we love her little girl and are forever bonded with her through the miracle of adoption.

And there it is.  Pain and joy.  Our Peaches stands between the pain that her birth mom has experienced in the relinquishment and the joy that we will have when we hold her.  Peaches will experience both these emotions in an unrelenting, unimaginable way that neither we, nor her birth mom, will ever feel or understand in the same way she will.  Pain and joy - that is adoption.