Seek First...

Ok, the story left off when we had said “yes” to God on the matter of adoption.  It was September 2009.  We were charting our next steps (decide upon an agency, narrow in on country, investigate financial assistance, etc).  We both had complete confidence that this was the right thing for us to do, but we were also a little disappointed that I wasn’t pregnant. 

Then in October 2009, would you look at that?!  Pregnant.  Rather than turning us in another direction, we saw this as confirmation that we were headed down the right path.  If in fact, children are a gift from the Lord (and we believe that they are), and if those whose “quivers are full” of them are blessed, then we counted this as God’s blessing on our decision, our commitment, to adopt a child as He had asked (Psalm 127:3-5). 

It was immediately clear that God had used, if not orchestrated, this 6-month halt in the “production facilities”, to obtain our attention, to turn our faces toward Him, and to communicate with us.  If we had gotten pregnant right when we hoped and expected, is there any doubt that we would have been preoccupied with that exciting addition and lulled into submission to the trajectory of our own “family plan,” and less open to the still, small voice that was speaking to us.  I shudder to think of all that we would have missed.

During Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, he tells a crowd of followers to “seek first [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).  Jesus is talking about food, drink, clothing, material things…things that the people wanted and desired.  We wanted and desired another pregnancy.  But we set that aside and sought God’s heart on the matter.  Once we died to ourselves, to our approach, to our agenda; we were able to be wholly available to God’s master plan.  And once we committed ourselves to obey and follow hard after Him, He fulfilled the initial desire of our hearts to go through another pregnancy.  I am absolutely aware that it doesn’t always work out just like this, but I do believe that God is adept at satisfying the hearts of those who seek His will before their own.

So, four kids.  Wow!  Four does seem like a lot more than three, doesn’t it?  Though my great-grandmothers could juggle four with one hand while simultaneously milking a cow, I think things are going to get pretty busy around here.

We simply adjusted the projected timeline for our adoption (none of the agencies we were investigating would allow us to officially start the process while we were pregnant).  We first met with an adoption agency in December 2009 and had several meetings with various agencies over the subsequent months. 

Sarah

Would You?

Throughout the second half of 2009, while we were meeting with adoptive families and praying for much-needed wisdom and discernment, we were simultaneously researching adoption agencies online and requesting information from them by mail.  We found ourselves strongly considering three front runners, based on their mission statements, their reputations, and the countries they served.  As we researched further, we found many similarities between the agencies in terms of their policies, costs, travel requirements, procedures within various countries, etc.  Deciding between agencies was difficult.  Imagine charts with side-by-side comparisons (courtesy of Senor Spreadsheet).  Ultimately, we wouldn’t settle on an agency until further down the road. 

Then in September 2009, the simplest and most amazing thing happened.  God asked us to do it.  I know that God communicates with people a lot… through His living and active Word, through His creation, through the words or deeds of people around us.  But, it’s not very often that I have experienced such a distinct and certain message from Him.

Inaudibly, but clearly, He asked me to adopt a child into our family.  I was struck by the fact that it felt like a “request” rather than a “directive”.  Would you do this for Me?  One of My babies needs a home… are you willing?  Thinking back about this now, I wonder how many times He has “asked” me to do something, and I have said, “No, I’m good, thanks,” or “I’ve got a crazy week, but I could probably get to that next Thursday,” or I’ve put my fingers in my ears with a defiant la-la-la-la-la so as not to hear Him and be forced to respond at all. 

One night during our devotional time, Ryan checked in regarding my latest thoughts about our adoption decision.  I told him that I felt like God was asking me to do this, and he replied that he was getting the same message.  From the start, this had been, for us, much less about figuring out if adoption was something that we wanted, and way more about figuring out whether adoption was something that God wanted for us.  So, once we both heard from Him, we didn’t continue to weigh the options or crunch the numbers (unfortunately He did not specify which agency to use, so the spreadsheets were still in play).  We didn’t know the details yet, but it was at that point that we committed our hearts to adopt a child out of obedience to Him.

Sarah

Accepted!!

I received a call this afternoon from the Director of the Ethiopia Program at Children’s Hope International.  Our application to adopt from Ethiopia was approved, and she was calling to apprise us of the next steps.  Early next week we will reportedly be assigned a “personal adoption consultant” to assist us through the rest of the process (and from the sounds of “the rest of the process” we’re going to make sure she earns her keep).  Next, we’ll begin gathering and assembling documents for our dossier, to eventually be submitted to Ethiopia.  What, you ask, is a dossier?  According to Wikipedia, a dossier is typically a briefing paper based on an individual of interest in police or intelligence circles.  (Yes, I feel a little bad about using Wikipedia, seeing as they exposed all those classified national documents, but they’re just so darn convenient when it comes to definitions J). 

Seriously though, this adoption dossier is a monster…it’s designed to give the Ethiopian government a clear picture of us as a prospective adoptive family.  It will contain our homestudy, birth certificates/marriage license, statements from our financial institutions, letters from our physicians, letters from law enforcement, reference letters from friends, approval letter from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and a myriad of other forms and files.  Then, the whole deal has to be certified and authenticated at the state and federal level, before going to Ethiopia to be reviewed and approved over there.  Wheww!  Let the paper chase commence!!

Sarah

Adoption... there's an app for that

… and our app(lication) was postmarked today!!!

Photo courtesy of our 5-year old… below is his first attempt.  It is one of the better pictures I've seen of myself  :-)

Ryan

Our First Steps

We hardly knew where to start as we sought to determine whether God was calling us to adopt.  We began to pray (and I would humbly submit that these were rich prayers…the kind in which I engage much too rarely), honestly and repeatedly bringing this topic before God and asking Him to surround us with wise counsel, to open or close doors of opportunity to us according to His plan, to give us clear direction and the ability to discern His will for our family in this area.  We prayed like this, day after day, during our evening devotion time. 

And while we were seeking and listening for God, we were also compelled to do something.  Sometimes it’s easy to get caught waiting for God to make Himself unquestionably clear, to give us an unobstructed view of the road that lies ahead, a glimpse of the master plan.  Our experience is that He often doesn’t work like that.  Our experience is that sometimes God desires our willingness to take a step before He clarifies the steps that will follow.  And sometimes, for us, that clarification comes in the form of confirmation of those first steps and sometimes it appears as a change in direction.

In our desire to take some steps, we began where any wise and reverent person would…Google.  Ryan literally googled “adoption” and sifted through the resulting avalanche of information.  I (the alleged technophobe, who just shamefully used “google” as a verb for the first time in the previous sentence) began talking with adoptive families that we knew.  Over the next months, we had wonderful and informative conversations with 8 adoptive families (mostly they explained, and we listened with our amateur-level of acumen and discernment, occasionally formulating an intelligent question).  Let me take this opportunity to note that we’ve come to recognize that adoptive parents, as a group, are good folk.  We’d be undeservingly honored to be counted among their ranks.  The families we met with were, without exception, so patient and gracious in sharing this sacred part of their family story with us. 

As we went through those months of praying and gathering information, God did surround us with wise counsel of these adoptive families, and He did open countless doors to us in our quest for information, putting us in contact with agencies, resources, and people (sometimes friends of friends, previously unknown, who had completed or were in the process of an adoption).  We began to see this as God’s confirmation that we were heading in the right direction.  More to come….

Sarah

I Remember it as if it were Yesterday

Alright, we enjoyed a two week Christmas break, so the blogmaster was able to find a minute for a post.  Ryan has provided some staggering adoption statistics and other inspirational tidbits over the past several weeks, and I have been charged with narrating our own adoption story, which began almost 2 years ago now. 

As you’ve been reading (if anyone’s been reading), I began to recognize the beauty and necessity of adoption starting back in college when I interned at an orphanage in Merida, Yucatan, for a semester.  The faces of those children are seared into my mind, along with their relentless and desperate drive to obtain my (or anyone else’s) attention and affection.  I didn’t know it then, but I’m certain that semester was ordained as a foundational building block for my future professional career and my unforeseen role as an adoptive momma.  In my subsequent years as a therapist for very young victims of trauma, I worked with countless children who were in the care of someone other than a biological parent.  I was further impressed by the importance of adoption.

Ryan started to become convicted several years ago about the international orphan crisis.  We talked about it occasionally, but mostly it was something that he wrestled with, researched, and considered.

Fast forward to May 2009.  I remember it as if it were yesterday (actually, I have minimal recollection of yesterday…what day was it anyway? what did we do? I’m pretty sure it involved chicken nuggets for lunch).  But, I do remember this particular evening in May 2009.  We were eating dinner outside on the patio of one of our favorite restaurants.  We were by ourselves (as in no children with us…one of over four times that we had a date night that year).  Several months previously, we had agreed that we’d like to grow our little family (and had taken for granted how we’d go about doing so, if you know what I mean).  However, I will never forget that evening when Ryan looked across the table and casually asked, “Do you think we should think about adoption?”  I was simultaneously startled and intrigued by his interest.  Had I not been chewing on the most delectable bite of Wild Mushroom Ravioli, I may have dropped the food right out of my mouth.

We spent the rest of that evening talking about adoption and processing this unexpected turn of events.  We brainstormed, we discussed, we asked questions.  We were curious, overwhelmed, and a little bit nauseous (which we knew by now was usually an indication of something big…ask me sometime about the night Ryan first brought up the subject of marriage).  By the end of the evening, we agreed on two action points: we would pray fervently in an attempt to discern whether Ryan’s little inkling was from God; and we would investigate adoption.  Stand by…… 

Sarah

Give Me Your Eyes

Brandon Heath wrote a great song titled “Give Me Your Eyes”… the chorus of the song goes like this:

“Give me Your eyes for just one second… Give me Your eyes so I can see… Everything that I keep missing…Give me Your love for humanity.

Give me Your arms for the broken hearted… The ones that are far beyond my reach... Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten… Give me Your eyes so I can see”

Here are a few things that I was not seeing until God opened my eyes:

•     1 billion people are starving to death on our planet—half are children

•     Another billion do not have clean, safe water to drink (my dog and my lawn drink better water than these precious people)

•     There are twice as many slaves in the world today than all the slaves brought to America before the Civil War—and many of them are children.

•     There are ~145 million orphaned children in the world

•     More than a third of the entire world’s people live on less than $2 a day.

•     And here’s one that’s got a strangle hold on my heart… 24,000 children, under age of 5, die every single day from preventable causes..infections, fevers, diarrhea .  That’s one child every 3.5 seconds.  171 kids have died since I started writing this post.  I’ve got three kids 5 and younger, and each of them has had at least one of these maladies in the past six months.  For us, it’s an inconvenience.  For so many others, it’s life-threatening.  Why?  Pretty much because they are poor…they simply can’t afford access to basic, life-saving medical care and supplies.  I’m not talking about MRIs here, I’m talking about $5 antibiotics, clean water to wash out a wound, or medicine to treat malaria.

Source for Statistics: The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns

It seems like a lot of things are broken in our world, but I’ve come to realize that I am broken, too.  God commands us to love one another, but I am indifferent and apathetic toward the issues people listed above.  I read stories and see videos about people in these situations…situations that are not consequences of their choices, actions, or attitudes, but the result of their being up against forces much too powerful for them to overcome on their own (ie-political, cultural, economic, natural).  My heart is moved, and I care… temporarily… but then life moves on, the moment passes, and I do nothing.

I am convinced that God’s solution for this type of suffering and injustice is the free will generosity of His people.  Everyone does something because no one can do everything.  We are Christ’s body on this earth… we are His hands, His feet, and His heart.  He works through His body… if we’re not doing it, no one is.  God chose us.  We are THE plan…there is no backup plan.  If we do small things with great love, we can change things, one person at a time.

So, it turns out that I am the one that needs fixed… I am the one that needs to see what Jesus sees and feel what He feels.  The great news is that if I open my eyes and my heart… Jesus uses me. There are solutions to address our world’s challenges and God can nudge me to do small things… from helping fund water wells to welcoming a baby into our home.

Ryan