How I reconcile all of this is with the knowledge that God is omniscient and that He has the power to help us optimize outcomes. He doesn’t force a thirteen year old girl to get pregnant or a woman in China to unwittingly have an “over quota” pregnancy because there are people in the world who hope to adopt. But because He knows all and that knowledge transcends time, He certainly has the power to help put pieces of a confusing puzzle together. As I envision it, when an expectant parent is praying for help knowing whether adoption might be the right choice for her child, the Lord can and will help her discern what is best. If her choice is ultimately to place her child, the Lord can also help her to choose the best parents for her child, and help the right hopeful adoptive parents to appeal to the birthparents. In the case of international adoption, or others where there is no birthparent placement decision involved, it’s certainly within His power to help match children with parents, and personally, I believe He can. It’s the ultimate in complicated matchmaking!

Having just used the term “matchmaking,” I want to touch on another aspect of the God-directed family building process that is sometimes debated, and relating it to marriage seems a logical way to do it. Take my husband, for example. I love my husband. He is the coolest, cutest, funniest, smartest, kindest guy I could ever hope to meet, let alone marry. BUT, as much as I love him and even though I can’t imagine a better match or life without him, I can’t say that I know he was THE one and only for me. If I had never met my husband, I’m sure I would have married someone else and been perfectly happy. I can’t even picture what that would be like, but I don’t believe I’d be pining away for some unknown love that had escaped me because I was two minutes late for my bus one day. I believe strongly that God has an overall plan for our lives, and thanks to patriarchal blessings and fasting and prayer, we can gain insight into that plan, but I don’t believe God micromanages us – that He dictates what we’ll eat for dinner, what we should study in school, or even who we should marry. I’m open to the idea that there may be exceptions to this, and I’ll confess that I’ve met a couple of people in my life that I feel an uncanny connection to and it’s crossed my mind that maybe I knew them somehow prior to this life, but in general, I believe that the choices we make are up to us. We can seek God’s guidance as we make important decisions, and, as was the case for us in a couple of instances, God can inspire us ahead of time in some way to know what we’re doing is right. But I look at the experiences of finding our children as “right choices” rather than “THE right choices.”

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