I thought I would start by giving a little history of how we made it to this place. Tom and I have both separately thought of adoption as an option for us even before we knew each other. We both felt open to the idea regardless of future fertility. When we were engaged we discussed this more seriously. At that point the discussion was basically, "We may want to adopt at some point in the future". Through the first years of our marriage this has taken more and more of a prominent place in our hearts. God's commands to take care of the fatherless has been showing up in our lives in many ways, though it just continued to be a nebulous idea for the future. We had a tough 2015. In January of last year we experienced an early miscarriage. In the fall we were expecting again. We were devastated at our first ultrasound to learn the baby's heart had stopped beating. This was a terrible experience I wouldn't wish on anybody, but our faith grew stronger and so did our marriage. During that year, adoption kept coming up. Sunday school lessons. Sermons. Friends adopting. A friend on a mission trip to an orphanage in China. Random pictures on facebook. It just kept coming up. We started to look into it more seriously. We actually talked to someone at an agency just prior to finding out we were pregnant in the fall, but decided to wait on starting the process. After losing that baby, we felt like God was telling us the time was now. We worked hard on our application for the last two weeks of 2015. During that time, we discovered we were again expecting. We were cautiously optimistic and trying hard to have faith in God's goodness. We still felt like moving forward with adoption was right.
We were accepted into the China program with our agency and have begun the preliminary paperwork before we can start on our home study in the next few weeks. PRAISE GOD that today we went for our first ultrasound for this pregnancy. There was an adorable little baby blob and a very precious heartbeat. We're pregnant with a healthy baby AND we're into an international adoption process. Yes, this is scary. We are already learning more about each other (if that's possible!) through this process, but also learning about being obedient to God. While the whole idea of being pregnant and adopting seems wild, we have peace about it. This is right. The timing is right. We know our adoption process will take longer than most due to pregnancy and settling in with a newborn in August, but we also know that whichever little one we welcome into our family, he/she will be the one God has always meant for our family.
So, while we realize things are about to get wild, today we are thankful. We're thankful for a healthy baby. We're thankful for peace about our decision to proceed with adoption and we're thankful for the support of our families. We're thankful that Graham is a pretty laid back guy and hoping he takes it all in stride. We're thankful for new life and our growing family!
How you can pray for us:
- Calm and reassured hearts regarding the health of our pregnancy
- Our child's birth mother has been on my heart for months. We don't know who she is, her circumstances, or what will/has affected her decision to not parent. We probably will never know. Pray for her heart as she has/will show her love by giving life to this little one. We pray that she will one day hear the gospel, as it is the greatest example of adoption.
