By: Chris Reeder
On October 6, after about 10 long years of trying and one failed adoption last September in which the birth mother changed her mind at the last minute, my wife and I adopted a five month old baby boy. We’ve named him Timothy James “TJ” Reeder after two of my favorite persons from the Bible.
This brings not just the normal expected joy to our life that you would expect with the arrival of a new baby but even greater joy in light of the devastating failed adoption last year. In that case the news that the birth mother had changed her mind came as my wife Jennifer and I were traveling from Tinker AFB, OK – she by air and me by car. Jen had just landed in Tampa when the call came. A friend and I had to complete the drive, we had made it as far as Memphis when we found out, to central Florida no longer to pick up our baby but now to rescue my inconsolable wife.
We were crushed and for the next year grew ever more doubtful that we would ever have a child. Nearly every profile we received was outside our comfort zone – at 51 years old for me and 48 for my wife we had realized that our tolerances towards things like prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol were really low, and these were both prevalent factors with nearly every adoption profile we received. Nevertheless over the next year there were a few situations where we did decide to have our profile presented to the birth mamma but we were never chosen – more loss, more discouragement, and more questions as to what God was doing. Was God ever going to give us a child? Why had God allowed us to go through a failed adoption – the very thing we prayed against in the first place? In our prayers we had told God we only had one shot at this in us, both emotionally and financially. Had we heard God wrong? Had God only called us to peruse adoption but never promised us a baby? But why call us to pursue adoption if He had not plans to give us a child? So many questions.
And no answers.
We had reached the end of our rope. We had traveled to East Tennessee to visit family on the occasion of my grandmother’s 99th birthday and we had decided that we were done. We couldn’t take it anymore. When we got back home Jen was going to email all the adoption agencies we were working with and tell to stop sending us stuff. No more profiles. No more emails. Nothing. We were done.
And on the way home we got a call from one of our agencies telling us that there was a healthy baby boy waiting for placement and he could be ours if we wanted him. We took a couple hours to talk and pray about it and jumped at the opportunity.
A week later we were in Hollywood, FL signing adoption papers. We had gone from Team Chris-n-Jen to a family – the Reeder Family – complete with a teething five-month-old who is precious in every way and whose presence reminds me that God is not slow in keeping His promises but that everything comes in the fullness of His timing.
I should have remembered this since my wife and I didn’t come to our marriage (first and only for both us) until late in life either. We met in Afghanistan when I was deployed in 2006 and she was working as a school teacher at the International School of Kabul. She lived there for two years. We got married on July 5, 2008. I was 39 and she was 36 when we got married. So I should have remembered about God’s timing.
Praise be to God.
Chaplain Chris Reeder is an ARP Chaplain in the Air Force under Florida Presbytery.