The Difficulties of a Very Stuck Elephant

International adoption is a hurry-up and wait experience. There are mounds of paperwork to go through, upon which the whole mechanism of adoption depends, but when you finish your part, it’s time to wait. You wait for the social worker to schedule a home study, for the social worker to actually visit your home, and for the social worker to write up the home study proper. Just those three things can take a couple of months. Adding to that waiting period is scheduling an appointment with INS to get fingerprinted, getting your clearance from INS, and waiting for the Federal government to record your clearance with the embassy of the particular country you are adopting from.

All of the above is only the preliminary stage of the process. Once your dossier is complete, it is sent to the government of the target country. At that point, you’ve done your part, and there is nothing to do but wait. Depending on the country, the waiting can be up to 18 months, before you receive a referral for a child. Then there is usually a couple of months or more to wait until everything is cleared for you to travel and meet your child for the first time.

Genesis 8:1-21
“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. 6 After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. 13 By the first day of the first month of Noah's six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. 15 Then God said to Noah, 16 "Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you--the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground--so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number upon it." 18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds--everything that moves on the earth--came out of the ark, one kind after another. 20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21 The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.”

It must have drove Noah and his family bonkers to be stuck on that boat with all those animals for 6-9 months. However did they pass the time? All the excitement of the Flood had now vanished into all the tedium of watching a bathtub full of water drain out, only on an ocean-sized scale. When the ark came to rest up in the mountains, there must have been some tense conversations between Noah and the other family members about when they were getting out of there.

God’s timing is always best. Whether its international adoption or sitting aboard a large wooden boat full of animals, God has the best schedule for departure. Often in adoption, particularly when there is a long waiting period, people will exclaim that their child hadn’t even been born when they began the process. If things had moved along exactly the way they had wanted them to go, they wouldn’t have the child they have now. God knew exactly which child was going to be placed in that family, and He orchestrated all the events to make it so.

The same was true for Noah and his family. If they had had their own way about when to get off the boat, the elephants would’ve probably sunk up to their eyeballs in mud.

There are few things in life more difficult than getting an elephant unstuck.....

Does anyone have a winch and some cable?