Lord Jesus, there is something we are afraid to say aloud:
What if the call never comes?
What if we wait and wait—
and no one ever chooses us?
What if our adoption profile eventually expires?
What if the paperwork has to be renewed again and again?
What if the fingerprints are taken again, the background checks repeated, the home study updated, the photographs replaced because the ones we submitted no longer even look like us?
What if years pass?
What if we grow older?
What if someday someone gently tells us that perhaps it is time to stop waiting?
Lord, we entered this process because we had love to give.
We opened our lives.
Our home.
Our marriage.
Our finances.
Our histories.
Our vulnerabilities.
We answered intimate questions.
We gathered documents.
We took classes.
We sat through interviews.
We asked friends for references.
We allowed strangers to evaluate whether our home was safe and whether we were prepared to become parents.
We made a profile and tried somehow to put an entire marriage, an entire family, and an entire lifetime of love into a handful of photographs and paragraphs.
And then we waited.
Lord, we knew adoption did not guarantee us a child.
We knew that being approved did not mean anyone owed us a baby.
We knew an expectant mother was not searching for someone to reward.
We knew adoption exists first because a child needs a safe, permanent family when his or her parents cannot raise that child.
We knew all of that.
But we still hoped.
We thought:
Surely someday someone will see us.
Surely someday the phone will ring.
Surely someday there will be a child.
And perhaps now we are beginning to wonder whether there ever will be.
Jesus, the possibility that we might never be matched carries a particular kind of grief.
We prepared to receive someone.
We made room.
Perhaps literally.
There may be a room in our home that has waited longer than we ever imagined.
A crib.
A rocking chair.
Books.
Blankets.
Tiny clothes.
Things chosen with such tenderness for a child whose face we could not yet see.
Maybe we walked into that room and prayed.
Maybe grandparents bought something.
Maybe family members began saving things.
Maybe we imagined Christmas stockings.
Birthday cakes.
Bedtime stories.
Baptism.
First Communion.
School pictures.
Family vacations.
Ordinary Tuesday mornings.
We were not only waiting for an adoption placement.
We were waiting for a whole ordinary life.
And Lord, if that life never comes, we do not know what we will do with all the love we prepared for it.
So we bring that fear to You now.
What if we never get matched?
Do not answer us with false certainty.
Do not make us pretend that because we prayed hard enough, adoption must happen.
Do not let us tell ourselves that if we have sufficient faith, You are obligated to send us a child.
You are not a transaction.
Prayer is not a contract.
And a child is never payment for faithfulness.
Instead, Jesus, give us the courage to ask boldly while surrendering honestly.
If there is a child whom we are meant to parent through adoption, please guide our paths toward one another.
Open the doors that should open.
Close the doors that should close.
Put our profile before the right people.
Give expectant parents freedom from pressure, coercion, manipulation, fear, or financial desperation.
Surround them with genuine support.
If an expectant mother desires and is able to parent her child safely, give her what she needs to do so.
If a father can responsibly parent, call him into that responsibility.
If relatives can safely preserve a child’s family connections, guide them.
And if, after free and careful discernment, adoption truly is the right plan for a particular child, guide that child’s parents toward the family who can best love and care for that child.
Lord, we desperately hope that family might be ours.
We can say that without shame.
Please let someone choose us.
Please let the phone ring.
Please let us hear:
“We have a possible match.”
Please let us experience the terrifying, beautiful moment when this waiting becomes real.
Please let us prepare the car seat.
Please let us pack the diaper bag.
Please let us stand beside a crib that is no longer waiting for an imaginary future.
Please let there someday be a child sleeping there.
But Lord, if another family is chosen, help us bless them.
Their being chosen is not proof that they are better than us.
Our not being chosen is not proof that something is wrong with us.
An expectant parent’s decision is not a ranking of human worth.
Protect us from examining ourselves mercilessly afterward.
Was our house not beautiful enough?
Were we too old?
Did we say the wrong thing?
Should our profile have been different?
Were our pictures wrong?
Was our family too large? Too small? Too ordinary?
What was wrong with us?
Jesus, silence that last question.
There may be practical things we can improve.
Give us humility to learn.
But do not let adoption waiting turn into self-rejection.
We are not contestants.
A child is not a prize.
And an expectant parent choosing another family is not declaring us unworthy of love.
Lord, protect us from desperation.
After waiting long enough, almost anything can begin to sound acceptable.
We may be tempted to ignore warning signs.
Spend money recklessly.
Accept unethical arrangements.
Promise things we cannot responsibly promise.
Overlook coercion.
Or convince ourselves that because we have suffered so much, we somehow deserve for this particular adoption to happen.
Stop us.
Never let our empty arms become an excuse for compromising another person’s dignity.
Never let our desire for a child become greater than our concern for what is right for that child.
Never let us pray for another family’s destruction simply so ours can grow.
Make our longing holy.
Lord, if years pass and we remain unmatched, help us discern wisely.
There may come a time to change agencies.
A time to reconsider the type of adoption we are pursuing.
A time to update our openness thoughtfully.
A time to seek another professional opinion.
A time to pause.
Perhaps even a time when we must ask whether continuing is still healthy and prudent.
Give us courage for those conversations.
Because sometimes continuing requires courage.
And sometimes stopping requires courage too.
If we ever reach the day when we must close our adoption file without having received a child, Jesus, please be especially near.
That may be one of the hardest days of our lives.
There may be no funeral.
No public ritual.
No obvious way for people to understand what has ended.
But something will have ended.
Years of possibility.
A future we had imagined.
The expectation that someday the phone would ring.
The identity of being a waiting adoptive family.
The little spark that said:
Maybe today.
If that day comes, let us grieve.
Do not rush us toward acceptance.
Do not let anyone say:
“Well, I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
as though a sentence can contain years of longing.
Let us cry over the room we prepared.
The names we imagined.
The grandparents who waited.
The holidays we pictured.
The child we hoped would someday call us Mom and Dad.
And help us remember an important truth:
We are not grieving a specific child who belonged to us and was withheld from us.
No child was ever owed to us.
We are grieving the parenthood we hoped adoption might bring.
That grief is real.
Hold it gently.
Lord, if we never adopt, do not let us believe that all the preparation was wasted.
Perhaps the classes taught us something.
Perhaps waiting enlarged our compassion.
Perhaps learning about trauma, attachment, birth families, foster care, and adoption changed how we see children and families forever.
Perhaps the prayers we offered for expectant mothers blessed women whose names we will never know.
Perhaps our waiting made us more attentive to foster children, struggling parents, grandparents raising grandchildren, single mothers, fathers trying to do better, and families in crisis.
Do not waste anything.
But Lord, we also refuse to romanticize this.
We would rather have the child.
You know that.
We do not need to pretend otherwise.
We wanted someone to call us Mom and Dad.
We wanted bedtime prayers.
We wanted Cheerios on the floor.
We wanted toys underfoot.
We wanted car seats and pediatric appointments and school forms.
We wanted someone climbing into our bed after a nightmare.
We wanted to teach a child to make the Sign of the Cross.
We wanted little hands folded at Mass.
We wanted to whisper:
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, watch over you,”
as we tucked our child into bed.
We wanted the ordinary holiness of parenthood.
If that never comes through adoption, Jesus, You will have to help us carry that loss.
And please protect our marriage.
Do not let one spouse secretly blame the other.
Do not let us wonder whether another husband or another wife would have produced a different ending.
Do not let years of waiting turn us into two disappointed people living beside one another.
Bring us back to the altar where we first became a family.
Before there was an adoption profile, there was a marriage.
Before we waited for a child, we chose one another.
If the adoption never happens, help us still say:
“I choose you.”
Not as consolation.
As covenant.
Lord, remember our parents too.
They may have been waiting to become grandparents.
They may have prayed every day.
Perhaps they kept a little gift tucked away.
Perhaps they imagined holding the baby we hoped would come.
If the match never happens, comfort them without allowing their grief to become pressure upon us.
Let them tell us:
“You have never disappointed us.”
And Lord, if there is someday no child for this nursery, show us when we are ready what this room can become.
Not immediately.
Do not make us transform it before we have grieved.
But someday.
Perhaps it becomes a guest room.
A prayer room.
A place for nieces and nephews.
A room where foster families are supported.
A place where someone lonely finds welcome.
A place where The JMJ Way grows.
A place from which prayers go out for families who are still waiting.
Whatever it becomes, redeem the space.
Let the room that once represented absence become a place where love is given.
Mary, Mother of Jesus, stay with the woman who wonders whether she will ever hear someone call her Mom.
St. Joseph, stay beside the man who prepared himself to become a father and wonders whether he ever will.
You loved Jesus with the full heart of a father although He was not your biological son.
Teach us the beauty of adoptive love without making us believe adoption is guaranteed to us.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, cover every waiting family beneath your mantle.
Cover the expectant mothers looking through profiles.
Cover fathers trying to discern their responsibilities.
Cover children whose futures are uncertain.
And cover the couples whose profiles are never chosen.
Blessed Fulton Sheen, pray for us before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
Teach us to bring the unanswered question into the Holy Hour:
“Lord, what if the call never comes?”
And then teach us to remain.
Not because we received an explanation.
Because Jesus is there.
Father, if there is still a match ahead of us, prepare us for it.
Prepare the child.
Prepare the child’s family.
Prepare everyone whose lives will intersect through that adoption.
And when the time is right, let the phone ring.
But if we never get matched—
if years from now we finally close the file—
do not let that be the day we conclude that You abandoned us.
Let it be a day of grief.
A day of tears.
Perhaps even a day of anger and questions.
But eventually, let it also become another place where we discover that our lives still belong to You.
We do not know what You will do with all this love.
But we place it in Your hands.
Not because we no longer want the child.
We do.
Oh Lord, we do.
We place it in Your hands because we cannot force another person’s decision, manufacture a match, or command the future.
So today, while the file is still open and the phone can still ring, we will hope.
We will pray.
We will prepare.
We will love one another.
We will live.
And every morning we will try to say:
Maybe today.
But beneath that hope, give us a deeper prayer:
Jesus, whether the call comes today, years from now, or never, stay with us.
If we receive a child, teach us to love that child well.
If we never receive a child, teach us what to do with the love that was waiting.
But please, Lord, if it is good and according to Your will—
let the call come.
Let us be matched.
Let there be a child in this home.
Until then, guard our hearts without closing them.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.
St. Joseph, pray for us.
Blessed Fulton Sheen, pray for us.
Always remember Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Holy Family! Help us to be a holy family and pray for us!
Amen.