What's in a name?

I got an email from the boys' social worker on Friday, to say that the decision to match us with them has been ratified by the official decision maker.

We are now, four months after first hearing about them, officially cleared to begin introductions with our sons.  We expect that to begin tomorrow.

The boys found out that we will be their parents, and saw the photo albums that we've made for them, on Friday evening.

I find it unbelievable that we only officially get the go ahead 3 days before we meet our kids!  And there are cases where things don't go ahead, either at matching or at ratification.  How is one supposed to prepare emotionally?

This was made somewhat easier for us by an interesting incident that occurred seven years ago.  We opened our home up for prayer for a few weeks, back in June 2004.  One day, Andy had been praying and came downstairs and said with great conviction, "God's just given me two names."  They were boys names.  We had friends at the time who wanted children and very specifically wanted twin boys.  We thought maybe they were going to have twin boys, and that was what they would call them.  So we wrote the names down.

And then our friends had a little girl.  And then another little girl.  We shrugged our shoulders and assumed Andy had been mistaken.

Nearly seven years, we were looking at profiles of children from social services.  There was one profile of two boys.  Something about them touched my heart.  I'd felt for months that God had been dropping hints that we might be getting boys.

We were sat, having coffee, talking about what to do next.  I was suggesting that we should find out more about the boys.  Andy was slightly miffed we'd only been sent 3 profiles, because he was expecting a catalogue full.  And I suddenly realised that the boys we were looking at were called by the names that Andy had been convinced God had told him seven years before.

How mad is that???

We didn't throw caution to the winds at that point, we continued to seek the information we wanted and we thought really carefully about it.  I'm pretty convinced, though, that it's no co-incidence that our boys are called by the names Andy thought God had told him all those years ago.

My first thought was,  "what a story to be able to tell our children!"

To be able to say that God had prepared a family for them, because He knew that they would need one.

It has also been incredibly helpful to me over the weeks running up to matching.  It's just given me the little bit of confidence I needed, that we've made the right decision.  Otherwise I would have been over-thinking the whole thing.  Wondering if we were doing the right thing, if they were the right kids, worrying that we might have got it wrong, that we've not asked all the right questions...

Instead, we've chosen to believe that these are the right kids and that things will go ahead.  Getting a 'yes' from the matching panel was still a huge moment.  And we were still concerned that they might say 'no'.  But that little hint that we were maybe heading in the right direction has made the last few weeks so much easier.

God is good!