Happy Referral Day

One year ago, on May 21, 2010 Rick and I were having a lazy Friday night. I was making hair bows for a daughter that I didn't even know and I had never seen. I had to stop because I was getting too upset thinking about her.


You see, a shared list came out 3 days before and we were not matched. We knew we were inching towards the top of our agency list to be matched, but we didn't know how close we were. We thought for sure May would be our month. We stayed up late checking our email to see if our agency in China would send us a file and it never happened. Here we were 72 hours later on a Friday night.


I quit making the bows and then head upstairs to check on my sleeping boys. Rick starts screaming from the basement.... I thought something was wrong, but it turns out that we had an email from China. It was all in Chinese, but we knew this had to be a file of a child. What else could it be? We were confused, because the shared list had already came out... so it took us a few minutes to make sense of everything. And then we saw her.... this face.

I couldn't stop crying! We had been matched with a beautiful 10 month old baby girl with cleft lip, cleft palate and a VSD. We finally had our Emma Grace. Liu Rong Jia was from the Fujian Province, found in Fuzhou City. We happily accepted her file and one year later, we have had the blessing of raising this precious girl for the last 7 months.

I often think about what happened for us to be matched 72 hours later. I know that it was a God thing... he needed to hide her for awhile until we were next in line on our agency list. We selected very common special needs... a young baby girl with minor needs is what everyone wants. Since we weren't at the very top, we couldn't be matched when the original list came out. I am certain that HE put her with another family who was not in a position to take her. Families are allowed to hold on to a file for 72 hours, then it is released back on the shared list. 72 hours later was our Friday night... but China's Saturday morning.


A member of our agency staff just happened to go into the office on this Saturday morning, see her file... and matched her with us. Because of the other matches from when the original file came out, we were now at the top and ready to be matched. A perfect plan set in place by our God to bring Emma Grace to the family she was always meant to have.


We love you, Emma Grace! Looking forward to celebrating many more referral days with our baby girl!!!