So why Ethiopia exactly?

I am sure the question people are thinking most when we tell them we are switching but don't want to ask for fear of sounding rude is:

"Why did you feel so certain about Ethiopia two years ago when you feel so certain about China now?  Are you just hearing God wrong or putting your own desires onto God to justify your decisions?"  

And I'll admit, I think those questions are valid in a way, not everyone thinks you can actually hear from God and understand when His plan seems to change, so it might sound a bit crazy to hear people say that God told us to adopt or that God told us to switch countries. In fact, that was one of my main worries, what people would think. So many people have supported us and I would hate for them to think we are squandering their support.

Chris and I have talked a lot about this recently actually.  Some of our thoughts about feeling called to Ethiopia in the beginning are:

• We would not have met the income or net worth requirements for China two years ago.
• We were not aware of waiting children lists or special needs adoptions.  We were on board with adopting, but not on board with dealing with any health issues, we wanted a healthy infant or young toddler.
• We had incorrect information and wrong assumptions about Chinese adoptions.
• I found an incredible adoption community on Facebook through our agency's Ethiopia program. We would not have been able to be involved in this or even known about it had we started out in China. This online community is seriously wonderful. There are days I feel much more connected to these women whom I have never met than I do to my real-life friends because they just "get it".  They get adoption, they get mountains of unending paperwork, they get painfully longing for and loving a child you have never met, they get fundraising, they just get it all. (There is a group for Chinese adoptive families too, but it's not nearly as transparent or supportive as the Ethiopia group) These people will be friends for life.

And even as recently as January, when we felt very sure about staying with Ethiopia and then not even a month later we felt such a peace about switching:

• I got let go from my job in March and if we had switched countries in January, our homestudy most likely would have been completed when I lost my job and we would have had to do an update just to change my employment. Right now, we are still in the midst of converting our homestudy to China, so all we had to do was update one form to account for my not working anymore. 

We are excited and a little nervous about what lies ahead of us in China.  But honestly we really have such a peace about the whole thing, which gives us confirmation that this is exactly where God wants us right now.  We trust God to lead us to our daughter and we trust that His plan is better than ours. I'm not saying it's always easy, in fact it's hardly ever easy, but we trust God enough to follow Him even when it makes no sense and it would be easier to not obey.