An Adoption Story

 

We are so excited to announce that we are adopting! We’re in the middle of this story that has an author that is so much better at writing our lives than us. I’m really excited that I finally get to share it with all of you. Like super excited. Like a kid the night before Christmas excited.

Before Jeremy and I got married, we talked about adoption as this abstract concept that we may one day be interested in. We talked about it again when we went through some infertility problems early in our marriage, making it more of a reality than an abstract. So I guess you could say that adoption has always been a topic close to our hearts. Fast forward eight years, and we have been blessed with three adorable (well, I may be partial, but I think they are adorable) biological kiddos. Those of you who know us well know that Caleb was far from an easy baby. Bless his heart, we love him so much, but his newborn phase wasn’t a cakewalk. A common problem with preemies, Caleb was born with an esophagus that wasn’t entirely formed. The result of that was him spitting up everything, and sometimes what seemed like even more than what, he ate and endless crying from the pain that came along with that. There were so many 4am mornings cradling him while he (make that we) cried.

I say all that because when I went to a women’s conference in San Antonio with some friends when Caleb was four months old and saw a video about children who needed sponsors, my first thought didn’t seem rational. My first thought was that I didn’t just want to sponsor a child, but that I wanted to adopt a child. You’d think that after months of massive projectile vomiting, I’d be about ready to move into the next phase of life. But God had other plans.

I absolutely love that God’s way is not always the most rational way. Actually, the majority of the time it isn’t. God’s way is one of irrational love. Our God is full of boundless, completely irrational love for us. How awesome is that? And we when seek Him, His irrational love springs out of us. Praise God for that! I kept remembering the verse from James that says, “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.” There are so many ways to go about that, and even though the path of adoption seemed a little on the crazy side, it seemed that God was leading us there. Adoption kept coming up over the next few months, rational or not, and this time I was listening.

 

About a month later, we went on a road trip to Florida, and I brought up the subject to Jeremy. We were driving on Thanksgiving Day because of the time constraints of pilot training, and the only thing open was Burger King. So over a chicken sandwich Thanksgiving meal in the car, complete with the sweet workers there wishing us a “Happy Thanksgiving” as they handed over our food, we talked through adopting. I honestly expected Jeremy to say no or at least be hesitant to the idea, but instead, he said, “Why not?” He was fully on board.  

We decided to wait until we got to Little Rock and then immediately started looking into the different adoption options…fostering, international adoption, domestic adoption. We had some ideas, some misconceptions, and there was a ton of praying going on about it all. Over the past year, God has placed some incredible people in our lives that have fostered or adopted. We have also had some really great meetings with people in the adoption field that have helped guide us. We are so grateful for both of those!

We ultimately decided to follow the path of domestic adoption, open to special needs, and like I said at the beginning, we’re thrilled that God is writing this story. He’s so, so much better at it than us. I love Jeremy’s first response to my question of what he thought of adoption, so we are saying “why not us” to this call we feel like God has placed on our hearts. We’re saying “why not us” to special needs adoption. During our time in the nicu with Caleb and through some of his minor medical issues since, God has softened our hearts as we have seen just a small glimpse into what life is like for little ones with special needs. It’s probably not going to be easy, and life is probably going to be a little messy. We may be crazy, and this is definitely not the normal “two parents and two kids or maybe three” vision of the perfect family we had in our heads when we first got married. And that’s ok. It’s actually even better.

We just completed our home study and were approved as a waiting family. We’re so excited! And now we wait. We wait for God to do His thing. It could be fast or it could be slow. Patience is not always my best quality, but I love that God’s timing is perfect. By God’s design, He has the exact right child out there for us, we are the exact right family for a child out there, and we are looking forward to being brought together. So whether it’s a long journey or a short one, we’re excited that we get to share it with you all!