Adoption can be strange and eerily coincidental. Some say fate plays a roll or that God plans it. I think most of adoption is chance.

Case in point…

Five years ago, on a rainy Friday night my husband and I were driving home from a good friend’s house discussing what we were going to do about our fertility issues. We had already decided that another round of treatments was just not going to work. My body couldn’t take the shots and and he couldn’t take the weekly trips to the lab.

We drove about 2 miles from our friend’s home and stopped at a fork in the road. It was a literal, not a metaphorical fork but it might as well have been. On the road sign directly in front of us was an arrow pointing both ways. Directly centered on the arrow pointing the direction we were to turn was a bumper sticker that said “adoption”. My husband and I looked at each other in awe, as we had just been discussing adoption. We decided to adopt the same night.

Was it fate or just chance that someone put that there? Or did God play a role? And, in general, which of the three plays a role in adoption?

If God plays a role in adoption then wouldn’t he plan for children to stay with their biological parents? And wouldn’t he plan for those families to be okay? Likewise, how could God plan for a mother to carry a child 9 months and then give him to another family, ultimately suffering a horrible loss? I can’t imagine that God would do that.

And if fate plays a role in adoption then you have to believe that there is an inevitable outcome in life that people like myself were always destined to adopt and that a child was always destined to be with a certain family. And then you question, who designs that fate; you or a higher power? And what happens if a birthmother just, by chance, changes her mind?

Now, if chance comes into play it makes sense….chance is unpredictable, an outcome in an uncertain situation, something that happens because of unaccountable happenings. Doesn’t that sound right? After all those roller coaster emotions during the adoption process or the process of choosing a family, doesn’t it make sense that it just happens?

Perhaps, perhaps not. What do you think?