Paul and Joseph were two men that taught me about feeling God’s peace in the hardest of times.
Before I can tell you about them, let me give you a little backstory. In January 2013, my husband and I both told each other that we thought we should make a decision whether or not to adopt. We had thought and talked about it off and on for ten years - every time we had another biological child - and it seemed the time to decide once and for all if we should. We decided to take our question to the temple the first weekend in February.
In the celestial room, I experienced one of the strongest and clearest answers in my life. Both my husband and I came out of the temple feeling very strongly that, YES, we should adopt and that it should be soon. We both felt an intense urgency. After scrambling and stressing over paperwork for the next month and a half, we were matched with two little sisters from the DR Congo on March 27, 2013. We saw their faces through pictures, and again prayed and felt that they should be our daughters.
At that point, our agency let us know that the rest of the process would take 9-12 months, which seemed so unbearable. How could I watch these little girls grow up through pictures for up to a whole year? I told myself that we knew God wanted us to do this, so He would definitely help us zoom through the process. Maybe, I thought...maybe they would be home by the end of 2013. Maybe by Christmas!
By October 2014, they still weren’t with our family even though they were legally our daughters. The entity of their government that handled immigration would not let them, or any of the other hundreds of adopted children, leave the country. They had said they were suspending the process for a year, but that year had come and gone and there was no end in sight. We hired a foster family to care for our girls and, having no idea when they would join us, I decided to visit them.
That month I got to travel to Kinshasa, the capital city of the DR Congo, where my daughters lived. I spent a week with them. It was one of the hardest weeks of my life - the exhaustion of traveling met with sickness, the difficulty of visiting a third-world country where I didn’t speak the language, the overwhelming task of getting to know and caring for a 3 and 5 yr old who didn’t know me or trust me.
It was also one of the best weeks of my life - seeing those pictures that I had watched for months actually living and breathing, hearing their laughs and adorable voices jabbering away in French, taking them swimming for the first time in their lives, feeling their little arms around my neck as they giggled in the cool water, snuggling close to them all night and just enjoying having them with me.
When the week was over, I took them back to their foster home and somehow said goodbye. My younger daughter was hysterical and had to be pried off of me. I felt a peace that could only come from my Heavenly Father as we drove away, back to my hotel, but my heart ached for her. I wasn’t leaving until the next morning, and that night, all alone, I had a lot of questions for my Heavenly Father as I knelt in prayer. What it all boiled down to for me was this thought:
What if we had been wrong to start this whole crazy process?
I could trust that it was all going to be okay if I truly knew that God wanted us to adopt. But what if He hadn’t? What if we had been wrong that day in the temple? What if we were just messing up our daughters’ lives even more by making them live in this limbo? How could I know this was what Heavenly Father wanted when it was going so badly? I couldn’t see His hand in this mess.
I felt comforted that night, but received my real answer the next morning, as I was leaving my daughters’ city.
The airport experience in Kinshasa is intense and chaotic, and several other adoptive parents recommended that since I was traveling alone I should hire someone to help get me and my bags checked in . His name was Paul. He was Congolese and spoke at least four languages. I had met him during the week as we had hired him to go a few places to translate. So that morning, Paul and his driver loaded my suitcases. Before we even left the courtyard, Paul turned to me and softly started talking about what a hard day it was for me. I will never forget what he said.
“Your children may feel like you have abandoned them right now. They don’t understand why you can’t be with them. They don’t understand what you are doing to bring them home. But you know.
You may feel like God has abandoned you right now. You can’t see what He sees. You don’t know what is going to happen. But He knows.”
As I nodded my head and agreed wholeheartedly with him, he let that settle, and then we talked a little more about God, and he continued.
“Look at Joseph in the Bible. He had a dream when he was a teenager. That dream did not come true for many many years. Even as he tried to do what God asked him to do, it was not easy for him. He was sold as a slave. He was accused by Potiphar's wife. He was thrown in jail. And we know that it all worked out because we have read the ending. But while it was happening to Him, he didn’t know how it would end. He might have wondered if he had really dreamed that dream or if it was from God.”
I can still see the busy Kinshasa street we were on when Paul said this to me. Time stood still as he taught me, from the Bible, and the Holy Ghost manifested to me that what Paul was saying was a direct answer to my prayers the previous night.
I knew, in that moment, that my Heavenly Father had answered my prayers, not just from the previous night, but in the temple back in February 2013. He knew me so well that He had sent an almost-stranger to speak the very words I needed to hear, halfway across the world, in a language that wasn’t even native to him.
I thought about Joseph many times in the long months that followed. Every time we got bad news and it felt like our daughters would never join us, I tried to remember that God knew the ending, and He had not abandoned us. He had asked us to do this work, and His promises were always sure.
We continued on in faith, even as many of our adoptive friends either gave up or illegally paid smugglers to sneak their children out with false documents. We visited Washington DC three times to meet with congressmen, representatives from the Department of State, and the DR Congo ambassador to the US.
We kept serving in callings, praying, going to the temple, and paying our daughter’s foster family.
Elysee and Simone finally flew to join our family on June 8, 2016, more than three years after we had first been matched with them. They were sealed to our family six months later.
Now, after five years, I’m sure that people look at our family and only see the victory, the happy ending. They don’t know the agony and uncertainty that clouded our lives during those years.
If you’re in that agony right now, please know that God has not forgotten you or abandoned you. Even when Joseph was in prison, Genesis 39:21 tells us: But the Lord was with Joseph.
God is with you.
You haven’t reached the end of the story yet.
It’s not over.
God knows you.
He is working on your behalf in ways that you may not realize for years.
We can always trust in His promises.
That’s what Joseph and Paul helped me understand.
