POST #2 From Miracles to Emmanuel – Saying Yes and Waiting
In 2024, when we said yes to adopting Emmanuel, we knew very little. We knew he was a one-year-old who had a rough start and was living in a medical institution. His special needs were listed as “multiple neurodevelopmental disorders.” Our agency had tried to match him with other families who were already in the matching stage, but his needs were outside the parameters those families were willing to consider.
There’s no judgment in that. In our previous adoption, we too had marked certain needs as too severe to be a good fit for our family at the time. There’s no shame in limitations or boundaries.
But with Emmanuel, it was different.
God had called us to adopt him in such a specific way, and we knew it was him. Our answer was yes to whatever God had in store.
Given Emmanuel’s age and diagnoses when we said yes, we considered his delays and didn’t know if he would progress and develop. Our minds thought of wheelchairs and adaptive equipment. We wondered what his cognitive ability would be and whether he would be able to respond and engage with us. There were so many unknowns.
And yet, there wasn’t the fear we might have expected. Throughout the years, we had counted the cost of saying yes to following Jesus. That meant that whatever He called us to, we would do. While a child with severe special needs wasn’t something we had envisioned for ourselves, we had already said yes to it when we told God our lives were surrendered for whatever He wanted. And there’s a peace that comes when it isn’t about us weighing our own desires or trying to map out our own lives. It wasn’t about us. It was about what God was doing, and our answer remained yes. Instead of fear or excuses, there was excitement. We had already seen enough of God’s faithfulness in the past, and we trusted that these plans would be good too.
We officially began Emmanuel’s adoption process in December 2024. As weeks turned into months that made up whole years, I learned that despite my best, most organized attempt to speed up an international adoption, it wasn’t in my power to move it along. We hadn’t anticipated how much harder the waiting would be since we knew the child we were adopting. We cried out to God to bring it to pass. We found comfort in the fact that the same God who had woken me up one morning and led me to Emmanuel’s profile, would also see this through in His timing.
Months of waiting produced very few updates of Emmanuel. What bits of information we did receive were vague. Emmanuel was in an institution that cared for children with severe special needs and also fed homeless, elderly people. The institution had an active Facebook page and posted frequently. I scoured each posting and photo looking for Emmanuel. They blurred the children’s faces for privacy, but I studied each curly headed boy trying to determine which was Emmanuel. Over time I got pretty good at telling which one was him. Once they forgot to blur his face, and it almost made me cry to see a real updated photo after months of silence as we waited on lengthy legal paperwork. From 2024-2026, we saw posts about birthday parties, fundraising events, catholic ceremonies, holidays, and so many volunteer groups. In December of 2025, there was a post showing the children with little candles celebrating “Dia de las Velitas.” Ever since adopting Mila, we have celebrated this Colombian holiday that marks the beginning of the Christmas season on December 7th. As our family lit little candles and celebrated, Emmanuel was celebrating with candles at the institution as well. We had hoped he would be with us that Christmas. Little did we know, the process would extend seven more months.
As the summer of 2026 was coming to a close, we finally completed all the requirements and had all the official documents in hand. We then took on the task of packing for a month-long stay in another country. We had to pack dress clothes for encuentro, appointments, and court, cold weather clothes with rain jackets for Bogota, and warm weather clothes with swim gear for our time in La Mesa. We spent the last part of July in a packing frenzy until our departure date of August 2, 2026 rolled around. We had secured people to take care of the animals and the farm in our absence, had two months worth of our prescription meds in hand, and with nothing left to do, we loaded ourselves, 4 kids, 10 suitcases, and 6 backpacks and flew to Colombia to bring home our fifth child.
Finally, after waiting for 1 year, 8 months, and 13 days, we were going to get Emmanuel.
The pictures in this post are from Emmanuel’s time at the institution as well as pictures of our flight to Colombia.
In my next post, I’ll share about the first time we met Emmanuel.
