My husband and I always “talked” about adopting, but secretly never believed we ever would. In our first years of marriage, we dreamed of running an orphanage later in life, but it really just felt like we were playing “pretend” since we didn’t have a clue what parenting or the sacrifice involved was really about. It wasn’t until after we had two biological children that adoption kept resurfacing. Our third pregnancy, we miscarried very early on and the call grew stronger. After we mourned that loss, we took some time to just pray and wait to see what was next.
Waiting is never easy, yet more often than not it is the greatest thing we can do. God showed up. He showed up in God-fashion, subtle, but clear. In our time with the Lord, he began to put more and more “drippings” (as we came to call them) in our life. The question shifted from, “Why would we adopt?” to “Why not adopt?” As we waited on the Lord to speak, He reminded us of His adoption of us into his Kingdom and that he chose us for no reason other than love. Could we love “someone else’s child” bringing them into our family? To form our answer, we had to trust that it wasn’t that we had “enough” love to give, but that God’s love was sufficient and more than abundant. After nudging my husband numerous times, he finally said to me, “I am going to let you know an answer in one week.” He was going on a mission trip to New Orleans and on the final day after a week of prayer about adoption he sat as one of handful of white worshipers, in a predominantly black church in New Orleans and heard a sermon about adopting people into your life whether they are neighbors or orphans. It was the last dripping that made his cup overflow; he was ready.
The normal course of adoption is to choose a country and an agency and to move forward with the requirements of that country in mind. We did not feel that God had shown us the country but we moved forward anyway with the information that we did have—God was calling us to adopt, from somewhere. We knew we did not have any money to adopt, but knew God would provide so we moved forward where we could. We opened a bank account and deposited our coins from our piggy bank (really), roughly $26. We asked God to fill the rest. After completing our home study, we still did not know where in the world our children would be. We knew we wanted to do international adoption but were not sure whether to turn toward Central America or Africa. Europe appeared more costly and we were open to having a mixed race family. As we explored the opportunities before us, Africa and Ethiopia, specifically, rose to the top of our list.
In choosing Ethiopia, God fused together so many bits and pieces of us. Ideas that had resided in our hearts for years and that we had expected to be revealed in other contexts suddenly became clear indicators of why God was directing us toward adoption and Ethiopia. One example is my husband’s interest in international law that almost drove him to law school yet instead the dream came to fruition in our immediate family!
With our country decision came the next adoption payment and every subsequent month, another payment was due. Our account grew monthly to accommodate each pending payment. In a couple of cases, the money arrived in just the right amount on the very last day. We never had more than just the next payment but we always had what we needed. While we did tell people who inquired that we were praying for the money, we never asked people to fund our adoption. So many people, including Promise686 and its grant, had a place in God’s financial plan. Our account had just enough money to fund our trip to Ethiopia by the time all the paperwork came together for us to leave.
Meeting our children for the first time in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, surely qualifies as the most surreal moment of our lives to date. Caregivers, broken English, feeding instructions, medications, once-in-a-lifetime pictures and signatures paraded before us. That evening, it was finally quiet. Just like after the birth of our older children as we had sat in the hospital and the last of the visitors had departed, we paused to realize that God had chosen these children for us forever. The possibilities were endless yet it is in God’s faithfulness our hope resides. Seeing God’s hand in building our family gives us the assurance He is with us each day, giving us peace in each step to come.