There is an old Yiddish adage that says “Man plans and God laughs.” I’m not sure that’s true, but if it is, then I bet when God needs a good laugh he looks at my plans.
My whole life has been full of detoured plans and crushed timelines. I won’t bore you with a lifetime of excessive details of how things didn’t go as I anticipated. It’s the same old song and dance and I’m sure you could sing the second verse. Everyone has a lifetime of stories about how life didn’t go as they expected. So let me just tell you how we planned to build our family and how God had other plans.
Man plans
Even though my wife and I always planned on adopting some of our children, we figured we would have our own biological children first. We always heard about people who adopted as a backup plan because they couldn’t have biological children, so we thought we were going to help promote adoption by having biological children first and then adopting later. God must have thought that was funny.
We started foster and adoption classes two months after we got married with the idea that we would get the process out of the way so we could adopt when the right time came. We had it all figured out. We would have a child or two and then adopt a child or two and it would be awesome.
But God had other plans.
During the process of being certified to foster and potentially adopt a child we found out that having biological children wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought. We tried. And couldn’t.
We kept trying. And still couldn’t.
Our plans were changing right in front of our face and there was nothing we could do about it.
Meanwhile, we were still traveling though the foster care process. Both my wife and I knew we would be perfectly happy if we never had biological children, but somehow we still knew we were going to eventually have them, maybe just not as quickly as we originally thought. Our timeline was rapidly looking irrelevant.
For me there was one silver lining to the delay. I could adopt a boy as our first child. While I wanted to have both genders of children I always wanted to have a boy as my first born. I figured since it was beginning to look like we would probably be adopting our first child then at least I could choose the gender. We opened our home to foster a boy and a boy came our way.
We thought we were going to adopt him….but God had other plans. Our foster son went to live with a birth family member.
A short time later we decided to try again and we began to take calls for another placement. The call came in with boys that needed a home. For various reasons the situations didn’t seem right, but I had my heart set on a boy, so we would wait.
Then the worker said, “There is a little girl…” and it was obvious that God had other plans.
We had a daughter and couldn’t have been happier. Having one kid in Los Angeles was more than enough to start with. Or so I thought. Seven months later my wife got pregnant. With twins. Three kids under a year and a half!
God was definitely laughing at my plans now.
The strange thing is that it turned out God was right. I thought my plans were great, but I really didn’t know. I wanted a boy so badly, but after having my little girl I quickly realized that having a boy was dumb. We wanted to have biological children first to make adoption look good, but it turned out that adopting first has allowed my wife and I to become foster care and adoption advocates. We thought we liked sleeping, but it turns out we like having three kids more.
And it turns out God still has other plans.
God laughs
Change happens fast. Like when you get a phone call saying there’s a little girl waiting for you to bring her home. Or when you find out you are expecting twins less than a year later. Or when another year goes by and you get a phone call notifying you that your two-year-old daughter has a new sister.
Wait, what?
Yep, like I said, God still had other plans. We thought having three kids two-and-under in Los Angeles was a tall order, but apparently God thinks four kids two-and-under would be more fun. When God needs a belly laugh I’m sure he flips back to the original plans we made. It’s probably on the “best of” blooper reel of heaven.
It’s interesting to me that some choices you make then make other future choices for you. Like the choice we made to adopt our daughter. That choice meant her that life was our life. It meant that her happiness was our responsibility. More importantly it meant that when she had new sister, we had a new daughter.
Some choices you make make you. This was one of them for us.
I can’t wait to see what other plans God has. Well, maybe I would like to wait a little bit. But for now we have a new foster daughter.
We live in one of the most expensive, least family friendly places in the United States with four kids under two and a half!
And I bet God still has other plans….
Nick Reese wakes from a three-year coma to find the world he once knew is gone. An ancient virus has infected two-thirds of the world’s population, turning humans into either incredibly intelligent super-humans or large and indestructible animalistic creatures. For the survivors, there is no government, no antidote, and no safety. With the help of a beautiful hematologist named Faith and a man they call the Commander, Nick must survive long enough to discover the origin of the virus and learn how his blood could hold the key to a cure. But he has to do it while being hunted by the infected. And failure means the extinction of the human race.
