Maybe?

Meet Peter and Peterson. They are D's brothers and they are currently living at an orphanage in Port Au Prince, Haiti. They have been there for over a year now. They are nine years old, and they are boys. Their chances for adoption are not good.

They are my most recent moral dilemma. I feel very strongly the urge to adopt them. They come to me often throughout the day in odd little ways. I see a set of twins at the lake. On a TV show the other night a character named Pete Peterson. The Dateline special about the family who adopted twins from Russia and then went back for the other TWO older sets of twins. I see their faces every morning when D wakes up. Their big brown eyes look up at me through him and I wonder what they were like at his age, if they felt safe and loved. I think of their mother, and how she would probably like for them to be with D and us. They are already being separated from their big sister who is being adopted to California. And yet I can't decide if wanting them is much like wanting to be a missionary. Do I just want to "save" someone? Do I just want to appear to be doing the right thing even if I am not sure if it is God's directive for my life? And there are concerns. They have likely suffered abuse although to what degree we don't know. We have younger children in our home that could become potential victims if they acted out. Older child adoption even without these possible issues are full of unknowns. And in fact the "knowns" are even more disconcerting. They WILL, with full awareness of what they have lost, grieve for their home and their family. They WILL test and try their new family to see if they are staying put this time. They WILL struggle to adjust to a culture so foreign to their own they feel as though they are on another planet. The "maybes" sound better. Maybe they will be the resilient type. Maybe they were so well loved by their birth family that they are already grounded in their worth as children of God. Maybe they are strong enough, brave enough, and loving enough to make it through such a drastic life change at such a delicate age with their souls intact.

Maybe... we are supposed to be the ones to help them do it...