So, here's a little something

I wrote this article for my church's women's ministry newsletter about our adoption journey. It's very abbreviated, but since I didn't want to blog while we were waiting....and waiting....and waiting for Joshua here's a teeny bit of background on how we got here. If anyone's still out there : )

My husband and I talked about wanting to adopt before we were even married. We knew that adoption wasn’t “Plan B” as in our backup plan if we weren’t able to have children. Both of our extended families have wonderful adoption stories and we knew that adoption was a privilege and an important part of God’s family design “In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves.” Eph 1:5-6. We didn’t know where that desire would take us or if we would be able to adopt, we just knew we wanted to.

We got pregnant with our first son, Jackson right away and planned to have another child so that they would be exactly two years apart. What’s the saying? If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans? We struggled with infertility and had no answers to it, so we decided to pursue adoption right away so our children would be closer in age. We prayed and researched all the options and each of us on our own felt that our next child would come from China.

We trudged through 6 months of paperwork and many fees to be approved and got our “Log in Date” June 23, 2006. At that point adoptions were being completed in around 8th months from the log in date, so we felt confident our family would be complete within that year and started getting ready for another baby. Again, we had our own plans and God had His own plans. The adoptions from China suddenly slowed down dramatically. The months of waiting turned into years. It was painful many times. I suffered a miscarriage during that wait and we saw our funding dwindle as we had to update our information with government offices over and over. It became difficult to answer everyone’s questions. I just didn’t know when or even if we would be able to bring our child home and didn’t know how to comfort others, let alone myself.

We had heard about China’s Waiting Child program for special needs kids and had applied for that program while waiting for a “healthy baby”, but the children’s files we saw were not the right fit for our family and it became difficult to turn down children. Thankfully, we saw those kids being adopted quickly by other families, so we knew God had found them their home, but it was a hard process for us.

We had finally gotten to the point of wanting to quit the process, be content as a family of three and maybe focus more of our volunteer time on orphans in general. Our social worker was visiting last summer and strongly urged us to try the waiting children program again so we prayed and opened our hearts to wherever God would lead us. Before we even had our updated application done, our family coordinator called excitedly with a referral, a possible child for us. As soon as we saw Joshua’s face, we knew he was ours. It was funny, after years of no news, no movement, suddenly we were on the fast track to get everything in order and get to China. Joshua’s “Gotcha Day” was Monday January 25th, he was with his forever family and we were forever changed.

I gained so much more than a son that I love dearly, I also gained in my walk and knowledge of the Lord more than I ever considered way back when we first started talking about adoption 10 years ago. I wouldn’t change any of it.