**Our adoption process was halted on January 1, 2013 by an adoption
Below are the thoughts we put together at the beginning of this
wild process:
From Bethany:
"I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon." Phil. 2:19
Andy and I have known since we were married 8 years ago that whether or not we were able to have children of our own we felt the pull towards someday adopting a child. God did bless us with two amazing biological sons and we continued to believe that SOMEDAY adoption would be part of our families story and we began to feel called to a child with special needs. "Lets wait," we thought "we would love to have more biological children, we don't have $30,000 to pay for an adoption, I am in school, the kids are so young." We had many excuses. Meanwhile we were getting to know Jon and Nina Clark, a family from our church. We were blessed to get watch them walk through two adoptions in a year! Nina knew our pull towards adoption and wasn't quite as convinced by all of our reasons for waiting! While she was traveling in August to bring home her sweet daughter Elizabeth she sent us an email that would forever change our lives. Andy and I read the email on a friday morning with two little boys climbing all over us. I will never forget that morning as it was the last day of the week I was directing VBS and to say I was tired would be an understatement. I was wondering when I woke up how I was going to possibly make it one more day and the idea of beginning an international adoption and bringing another child into our house seemed daunting to say the least! We laughed together at the idea but decided that since its not every day that you receive an email asking you to adopt a specific child that we should at least think and pray about it.
Well you can see where that lead us...24 hours later and we were both on board. Our lives were changed. God spoke clearly and touched both of our hearts in ways we could not imagine. I spent the next few nights staying up way too late learning all about what we had committed to through the blogs of adoptive parents who beautifully share their stories. Many tears were shed! Andy spent the next few days with his calculator in hand trying to turn what we had into $30,000 (no such luck) and reading, reading, reading! At the end of that week our family had the priviledge of joining the Clark family to welcome home Nina and Elizabeth at the airport. Truly a life changing moment to watch this little girl walk through the doors, clearly already connected with her new mother, and into the arms of her father, brothers and sisters. It was beautiful!
That is the very basic version of the way God prepared us to welcome a new child into our family. There are many more details we would love to share and will continue to share along the way so check back often.
Andy's Turn:
Bethany did a great job describing how we came to decide to pursue the adoption of a child. For me, making that decision (and now, telling people about it) was exciting, exhilarating, overwhelming, and a little scary. Without a doubt, something in our hearts has shifted in a pretty profound way which is hard to explain but is, I suppose, one of the purposes of this blog.
About a year ago I wrote a little piece of reflection on the baptism of Abby Clark, the first Down Syndrome orphan I've ever had the privilege of meeting. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here.
If I were to add anything to Bethany's post, it would be to describe a run I took after the possibility of adopting Timothy first came to our attention. On this run (on which ironically, or providentially, I was training for a race that I was running to raise money for Down Syndrome adoptions!) I started to think of all the reasons we had not to adopt. You can read a nice summary of these in Bethany's post, which might all be stated this way: it would be profoundly inconvenient. And it would. And it is. And it probably will be, in certain ways.
But as I ran, inconvenience started to sound like a pretty lame reason. In fact, I realized that this orphan on the other side of the world was a real, living, breathing child. This still amazes me. (As I write this, at 10:15 pm Eastern US time, he is probably sleeping, but may be stirring for the day ahead of him.) And, as I ran, it became clear to me that the opportunity had presented itself to literally change this orphaned child's life. The convenience or inconvenience of it paled in comparison to the magnitude of the opportunity before me. At the risk of considerably overstating things, where would I be if Mary had responded to the angel Gabriel by saying, "I'd really rather not, this sounds really inconvenient!" Or what if early Christians in ancient Rome had chosen not to rescue the victims of infant exposure? Was it any more convenient for them?
All of a sudden, I was displeased, maybe better to say convicted, about how anxious I was to maintain my pretty little life, to manage things so carefully that risk (and faith?) was managed out of my life altogether. And I became aware that this was a pretty good strategy to live a boring, meaningless, safe life.
If this sounds a bit overdramatic (and I admit it might, it's been a long day), I should also add that this processing continued for the weeks and months to follow, and we tried to do a careful and responsible review of whether this was indeed something that we felt called to do. And all I can say is that it is, assuredly. There are many questions yet to be answered, many challenges that lie ahead, a lot of paperwork and errands (and, cough, fundraising). But something happened on that run and I think it's a good thing.
Andy
