The Steel Beam Phenomenon

We were very blessed to receive new pictures of JQ last week! A friend traveled to China to adopt her daughter, who happens to be from the same area as JQ, so they met and she sent me these pictures! Doesn’t he look so happy? She said he bounded down the steps to greet her and he was all smiles. Aw…our sweet and wonderful boy.

We are not without a certain amount of stress right now. There is so much going on and I’m doing my best to keep up, but I’m going to be honest here, this is a stressful time. I don’t really want to be edgy and irritable because I spend a lot of energy trying not to worry, but it’s happening.

As much as I want to go to China again and meet JQ and bring him home to join our family, I’m trying to stay cool about the timeline here. In the past, we have struggled with adoption timelines: they were always too slow and we experienced one snag after another that made the process drag out. This is not the case this time around; in fact, the opposite is true and this process is going very fast. Where I thought we might travel around Thanksgiving or early December, we may now be on our way in less than 8 weeks.

In less than 8 weeks, we will (Lord willing) get on a plane with our crew and make the journey to the other side of the world to meet our son. We are thrilled!

But this is where the stress part comes in: because it is so much faster this time around, we have less time to prepare, whether it’s our home, our finances, or our hearts. Sometimes, there is so much in front of us that it is overwhelming and it’s hard to know what to tackle first. We have been fundraising and I have been trying to work extra to pay for many of the expenses that go along with all of this, but again, it is hard.

I work from home. I’m a “stay at home mom” in that I don’t leave my house to do work. I teach my kids at home, too, but I have a business as a freelance writer that I have worked for several years to build. Some months, it is slow, and sometimes, it is extremely busy. For the past year and a half, I have been very busy with different contracts, sometimes working on several at once. It is nice because I like to work and to write and we have been able to pay off some things, like, you know, debt.

Since finding out that we are going to China sooner than later, I have been trying to work more to help offset some of the cost. I have prayed that the Lord would continue to provide for what we need to pay for this trip. And then, as I finished projects and turned in invoices, I reached a point that I have not been in for almost 2 years. I had no work to do.

I don’t mean I had nothing to do. I just mean that I had no income earning potential in front of me at all. Not one contract, not one word to write that was in any paying form. Every company that I work with had snags from their end that were delaying their processes, hence, they had nothing for me. It’s a shaky business sometimes. Being a freelancer means times of feast and times of famine. I just have been frustrated with the timing of the famine this time around.

Adding to the stress is Asher’s passport situation. I was half joking a few weeks ago when I made comments about calling the customer assistance line at the passport center for help. It is now a problem. We still do not have Asher’s passport and we cannot get a hold of anyone who can tell us what is going on. In this day and age, it seems weird that you shouldn’t be able to call, email, or otherwise message someone to get answers, but after several weeks, we are still in the same place. This morning, I FedEx’ed more paperwork to them, overnighting it to Virginia. We paid extra to have expedited service, which we were told they cannot guarantee anyway. We also contacted our Congressman’s office to ask if they will inquire for us as well.

It’s a problem. It’s stressful and it’s hard. We have reached the point that Russ and I refer to as The Steel Beam Phenomenon, which means that during a time of great stress, you cannot sit and focus on the problem(s), you have to just sit back and wait. There is nothing you can do. Last year, when we were building our house, we reached the point where we had a hole in the ground and a basement filled in. There were then plans for placement of a large, steel beam under the floor on the first level to act as support for the rest of the house. A good thing. But the county engineering department wouldn’t sign off on it, for whatever reason. They were in disagreement with the architect and the builder and despite calls, emails, changing plans, making modifications, more calls, and more emails, there was nothing we could do. The situation took a month to be resolved, in which there was no work done on the house at all. Our hole in the ground sat and waited while three different parties worked out the details about a steel beam.

But that’s how it goes. Three other parties (not us) worked it out. We tried (we really tried) and grew more and more frustrated with each day. There was no amount of work on our part that could change the situation at all. We just had to wait. It was painful to sit there and do nothing. It goes against the grain of life sometimes. But that is what had to happen. We couldn’t fix it and we had to rely on others to work it out and trust that it would eventually work out. And it did.


I will keep trying to reach someone about Asher’s passport but I don’t have access to their paperwork. I can’t force clients to contact me for more work. However, I can give up the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth that seems to happen under times of stress. Okay, I don’t really do that. How about giving up repeatedly checking emails? Wandering around heavily sighing in distress? I’ll think of some other things I’ll let go of as a response to stress and remember that this too, shall pass, and then one day, it will be a distant memory when we step off that plane and know that in a few short hours, our family will grow yet again and our son JQ will be with us.