DePriest Days: Flashback Flashback

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Flashback Flashback

Today some family members are celebrating their "Gotcha Day," as did some particularly dear friends a few weeks back. It had me thinking back to our own special "Gotcha Day," and so I went and hunted down an old Flashback Friday post (a meme I used to do here regularly on the blog) and found the one dedicated to our own Gotcha Day.

So let's flashback to Flashback Friday from September 26, 2008 in remembrance of April 20, 2004, on this glorious Tuesday! Happy Gotcha Day little Ray!
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I used my same method and just grabbed out of my bag to find the photos for this week's flashback. This is April 20, 2004 - Adoption Day, just about the best day ever.

This is a very happy family. As you can see in particular there are very big smiles on my face, Neal's face and Jake's face, the three people who really understood what this day meant, and had truly weathered the battle to get here. Jake is 10 years old, Ethan 3, and Victoria was 2 1/2.

Here they are, my prayer, my present (picking his nose, holding onto little Lizzy Danna) and my promise. I call them that because Jake was the baby we prayed for when it seemed we might never have children. Ethan is my present (in the sense of a gift) because he wasn't asked for, but rather in His infinite wisdom and divine plan, God brought him to our family. And Victoria was my promise because before I ever had any children, the one time I heard the nearly audible voice of God was in the midst of God healing my heart from the abortion I had in my teens, God promised me I would have a daughter, and ten years later, she was the fulfillment of that promise.

So many friends and loved ones came and helped us celebrate this day. Everyone is clapping because the end of one journey had just been accomplished. Neal and I had signed the papers the judge declared us "official" and our family was complete. Ethan was truly a DePriest, for life. What an amazing day that was, one we questioned many times if we would ever really get there, but we knew (and learned like never before) in that season, that God always keeps His promises.

April 20, 2004 was "Adoption Day" and absolutely a celebration of Ethan's "official" membership in our family, but because he was always a DePriest to us, it really was more our "Family Day." This is the day God made our family whole and complete. When Neal and I started to consider adoption in late 2000 we didn't even talk about it to anyone else. The prospect of it scared us. You hear so many terrible things about failed adoptions and we didn't want that to happen to us. We told the Lord if it was His will, we would really need Him to direct our paths, drop it in our laps even. One day our Pastor's wife, Carol, called us because she had heard about a baby who was going to need a home. She said as she prayed God kept bringing us to her mind. "Had we ever considered adoption?" That first baby did not turn out to be our child, but it started us talking about adoption with our families. The day that opportunity ended is the day Carol got the call about another crisis pregnancy. In just a matter of months we brought Ethan home.

Ethan means "steadfast & permanent." I was looking up another name when this name popped off the screen and I knew it was his name (before we even knew he was a boy.) There were many times in the next 3 1/2 years that I had to go back to the name the Lord had given me for him and hold to that promise that he was ours, he was permanent. It helped a lot that shortly after Ethan came (less than 10 months later) God had fulfilled the promise of Victoria's birth, I am certain to assure us of His faithfulness. We had more loops and turns in the roller coaster adoption than you might find in ten other adoptions combined, but we held to God's promises and He kept them as surely as He made them. And that's why this adorable little boy is ours. This picture is later in the day where we spent the whole afternoon at Disneyland celebrating.