On Wednesday 1/11/12, we hosted our Fellowship Group at our house. One of the men in the group, Mike, and his wife, Martha, adopted a little girl with a hearing disability from Ukraine about two years ago. Mike has been organizing a trip for our church to go to the orphanage and help out. He and Daniel have talked about it a lot, especially over the past year. We talked about it that night.
Well, when Mike got home that night (we found out Mike and Martha’s side of the story a few days later), Martha showed him a picture of a little girl on Reece’s Rainbow who she had already been praying for and getting information about. Reece’s Rainbow is a website that advocates for special needs orphans. Martha has looked at thousands of children on this website over the years, and she told us something just stood out about this little girl (Maria). Even Mike said that he knew there was something different about her, so he decided to send an email to Daniel about her. We later learned that he never sends these types of emails to his guy friends, but thought that maybe we would know someone who could help her.
As Daniel and I crawled into bed that night, he was playing with his iPad. He opened an email from Mike that read,
Daniel,
These are pictures of a little girl from Russia that needs a home, she has Treacher-Collins syndrome, it does not affect intellect it is only physical. Get the word out if you can, she is really close to being transferred to an institution, then adoption is off the table for her and having this kind of physical defect in Russia will not be good for her once she is older and out of the system. There is more info on ReeceRainbow.org or Martha's blog.
Daniel then scrolled down to the pictures in the forwarded email. The instant he saw at Maria, God told him, “That’s your daughter.” He describes it as seeing a quarter and thinking, “Hey! There’s my quarter!” when you didn’t even realize you were missing it in the first place. He then showed me the pictures. I told him that was really sad. As he took the iPad back into his hands, he just kept staring down at it, and his eyes welled up with tears. I knew something was up, so I prayed, “Okay Lord. Something is obviously going on. Please make your will known to at least one of us.” I laid there and prayed for a while and after a few minutes rolled over. I typically fall asleep within a matter of seconds, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened. I continued to pray as we lay in the dark for some time. Daniel’s face was pressed against mine, and I could tell that he was still crying. Finally, I turned over and asked, “Is everything okay? Do you need to talk?”Daniel immediately broke out in tears, and when he was able, he said, “I just prayed that... I said, Lord, if this is real, I really need Jessica to roll over so that we can talk about this. And you IMMEDIATELY rolled over!” He told me that he thought we were supposed to adopt the little girl in that email. We chatted for a few minutes, and then Daniel went into the living room. We both prayed for a while separately. I finally fell asleep, but Daniel stayed up most of the night talking to God, researching Treacher Collins Syndrome, finding out more about adoption, sending an email to the Reece’s Rainbow contact, and searching the Word. I think he finally went to sleep around 4 AM. In the email that he sent that night to the Reece’s Rainbow contact, he told the lady that we were interested in “Dana.” He also requested any other information they could provide and asked why Dana would be transferred to an institution. He also asked the contact not to tell our friend Martha. She had been dropping hints that we should consider adoption, and he didn’t want her to be disappointed if she found out about our interest and decided not to adopt.
To see what we saw that first night, check out “Dana” on the Reece’s Rainbow My Family Found Me page (http://reecesrainbow.org/category/rescued).
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