prayer and wrong roads

Remember the story that Elder Holland told about how when his son was young, they were driving on back roads and came to a fork in the road and they weren't sure which was the correct one. So they decided to say a prayer together and ask which was the right road to take. After the prayer they both felt the road to the left was the one they should take. A mile down the road it came to a dead end.

What?  Why would you feel that that was the correct road to take if it so obviously was not?

Does this happen in your life? It does in mine.

These past few months have been interesting. Back in August we felt like pursuing adoption by doing a home study would be what we should do and I started paperwork. But I didn't feel an urgency with it. So I worked on it and set it aside for a while when we moved and got settled again.
But then as we prayed, I kept remembering that Foster Care was an option. We started praying about this and I immediately started meeting wonderful people who have done or are currently doing Foster Care. I was dreaming about holding babies that weren't my own. I was thinking about it non-stop.

So obviously, I felt that the Lord was telling us that Foster Care was the path we were supposed to take.

I found an agency. I did the online application. We attended the intro class. We did another application and mailed it. I ordered books about foster care that they recommend reading.

Then the church made their announcement that they were partnering with adoption.com.

My world stopped and I knew we had hit a dead end with Foster Care. It was not the road we would continue on. The original Adoption road had been the one.

So why the dreams? Why did I meet so many people out of the blue? Why had we been encouraged to take that road?

Let's go back to what Elder Holland said about his own experience. He explained that it certainly wasn't because they hadn't received revelation. And it wasn't that they were wrong. But rather, "with the sun going down, that was undoubtedly the quickest way for the Lord to give them information—in this case, which one was the wrong road. Now, though the other road might not be familiar and could be difficult in places, they could proceed confidently, knowing it was the right one, even in the dark."

So when this happens to me, when this happens to you, remember, the Lord sometimes has to allow us to take a wrong road so we can be completely confident when we change our course and take the right one. 

We submitted our 57 pages of paperwork to our agency for our home study. We are scheduled to be fingerprinted and we have a date set for the social worker to come to our home for interviews and the home study. We are knee deep in preparations and we're loving it!