Remind Me, When Were We Having That Inspection?

I did think it was a little strange when the county code inspector said that she could come by to inspect our house at 7:00 am.  But hey, we're always up and moving by then, so might as well get it out of the way, right?  No need to even set an alarm.  See you then, Ms. Inspector.

Note to self: next time, set an alarm.  Not sure it's putting the best foot forward to run downstairs in pajamas at 7:20 because you've finally awoken to the banging on your front door.

Thankfully, we passed anyway.

Everyday Heroes

Here are just a few of mine...

Truly the day is not complete in our house unless both of these cute boys have dressed up as firefighters and rescued someone at least once.

Here are some of our other heroes...Lin and Ben Preiss. Friends from high school/college and our friendship only gets better with time! For the past 8 years we have lived on opposite coasts, but now they are only three hours away. Such a gift! Ben is doing his residency to become a Doctor of Osteopathy and Lin is doing her residency to become a Chaplain. Even with their busy schedules filled with long shifts and sleepless nights they drove down to spend 24 hours with us. They bring much joy and encouragement to our lives and they love our boys!

All THREE of them!

(Got this picture as they were leaving...poor Caleb was ready for bed!)

Less Risky for Whom?

Following up on Bethany's last post and link...

The other day the New York Times had a story on a less risky prenatal test for Down Syndrome. This is very welcome news because it is safer for the mother, which is something to be thankful for! However, prenatal genetic screening raises thorny but important ethical questions. While genetic screening can help prospective parents prepare psychologically and otherwise to welcome a child with special needs, it is important to remember that no prenatal test for Down Syndrome provides any cure for Down Syndrome. Rather, such tests dramatically increase the odds that the child with Down Syndrome will not be born. So while I'm glad and thankful that this test is safer, I think we also need to keep in mind that this test turns out to be very risky for the Down Syndrome child.

In some ways, our journey towards adopting a child with Down Syndrome began with our own ethical considerations of prenatal genetic screening. When the abortion rate for a DS diagnosis is around 80-90%, we should be concerned about the values and messages our culture is giving and receiving about the value of people with disabilities in general, and the value of people with Down Syndrome in particular.

Must Read

Please...do yourself a favor, visit Adeye's blog and read her amazing post about the beauty of a child with Down Syndrome.

Meet My Favorite Southern Baptist

I know, I know...you're dying to find out who it could be?

Billy Ray Cyrus?  Not since he cut his mullet.

Clarence Clemons (may he rest in peace)?  He's certainly in the running.

S. Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A?  (Dare I say that his cuisine is overrated?)

Nope, meet my favorite Southern Baptist: Russell D. Moore, Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church.

Why is he my favorite Southern Baptist?  First of all, because he wrote a great book called Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches.  This book played a huge role in our own decision to adopt, and I highly recommend it to you.  I recently wrote a short review of it in the PPL Monthly.


If that weren't enough, here is Dr. Moore taking Pat Robertson to the woodshed.

And if you want to hear a phenomenal sermon on adoption and the gospel, give a listen to Christ in an Orphan-Making Culture.

And then, if that's not enough for you (and you have a free 95 minutes), here is Dr. Moore and Robert P. George of Princeton (no slouch himself) discussing evangelicalism in America, a topic most people just don't get.

Sorry, my posts are bound to be a bit dorkier than Bethany's.  Can't help it.

Where Are We In the Process?

Good question.

We are in the very initial stages. We are currently in the homestudy process, which typically takes 2-3 months. We are gathering lots documents, having interviews, getting background checks, asking folks to write reference letters, signing lots of forms, etc.

After we are officially approved, our information is assembled into a dossier that is sent overseas, from that point we're told it can take anywhere from 6-18 months to finalize the adoption. We need to make 3 trips ourselves to attend court hearings, visit the orphanage, and lots of other stuff that I don't know about yet.

As you can see, it's a long, complicated, and stressful process for people like us who like to feel like things are under their control. I've described the experience so far as: one part Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare, and one part white-water rafting.

Thanks for walking through it with us, and for your prayers along the way.

Andy

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 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.

Bethany is astonished at how long this is taking me to write so I'll sign off now.

Andy