Sign Posts along the way!

Stephanie Fast

when she first came home

as a Korean orphan.

Friendly note: In case you think by our earlier post that people should not be adopting from Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, or Uganda; please let us reiterate in this post that we believe South Korea is the country that God has for our family at this time. We don't want to discourage anyone from checking out other programs which may be a better fit for your family!

"Dear God; if You have a child who is waiting to be loved in a forever family, please bring them to us; or lead us to them!" - a friend encouraged us to pray this prayer at the start of our adoption journey!

I walk by faith but pray for "sign posts" along the way... These "spiritual mile markers" bolster my confidence while traveling an unfamiliar path; kind of like a gentle nudge from my Shepherd, reminding me that He's on this adventure with me, and that I should keep walking in this way! 

While this is not a complete list of "sign posts" (our adoption journey is far from over!) they did serve as confirmations, especially in the early stages of our adoption, that yes, South Korea was the country where God has a child waiting for us to be his or her forever family!

Luke's first cousin married a Korean man. He was such a strong man of God; a teacher with a servant's heart. We all loved his smile and his humor; he was a wonderful addition to our family. 

Tragically, he passed away in his early 30s; just a few years into their marriage, from a rare form of cancer. He left behind Luke's beautiful cousin and 2 precious children who strongly favor their Korean ancestry.

One of the things told to us as perspective international adoptive parents, is the importance of preserving our child's culture. Having Korean family members from the start, brings their culture so much closer to home!

Shortly after our decision to adopt, at the suggestion of a friend actively involved in orphan care ministry, we looked into Holt International. Holt International is a 60 year-old child services program; the first, in fact to make the rest of the world aware of the plight of orphans in Korea, following the Korean War and many other conflicts in that region.

Holt has been a fabulous! From the moment we started our paperwork and processing with them, doors begin to open so readily ... their staff has been so helpful and thoughtful and things have gone so smoothly ... it's been a real peace and answer to prayer.

We first heard about Stephanie Fast when a friend loaned us her DVD copy of Stephanie's testimony "She is Mine". Stephanie was an orphan from Korea; her father was an American serviceman during the war and her mother had no choice but to abandon her as the aftermath of that conflict ravaged their country.

To say that this woman's testimony is powerful, is an understatement of the year. Luke and I sat watching with tears as she told her incredible story of God leading her out of that war-torn country and placing her in a loving family where she thrived and grew to love the Lord and serve Him with her whole heart! 

A friend asked if we wanted to volunteer with their family at Winter Jam. Holt International is one of the sponsors of Winter Jam, bringing awareness to orphans and vulnerable children around the world through their child sponsorship program. 

Volunteering meant we wore a Holt apron filled with envelopes that had the names and faces of children from around the world who needed child sponsorship. Our job was to walk around during the intermission and urge people to consider child sponsorship.

(We were also able to arrive early and pick whatever seats we wanted in the house! Front row seats to watch For King & Country, Matthew West, New Song, & Lauren Daigle anyone?!)

A couple days before the concert, I found out who the guest speaker was going to be this year: yep; it was Stephanie Fast!

After the intermission when the concert begin again, I got lost in the throngs of people walking through the outer corridor around the Event Center. Being only 5 foot tall, this is not an uncommon occurrence for me ... but I was starting to feel a bit panicky and claustrophobic! When I finally saw an opening and broke through the crowd of people, I was standing right in front of Stephanie Fast!

She was sitting quietly behind her table ... there was no one in line ... she had finished her intermission message and was taking a break. I sprinted toward her and she stood up with the warmest smile on her face.

Stephanie Fast

"Oh, Stephanie I'm so thrilled I get to meet you! I thought I was going to be trampled in that crowd!! My husband and I just watched your documentary,...we were moved to tears... we just started our Korean adoption through Holt!" 

My words tumbled out over one another as she embraced me tightly and whispered in my ear "Bless you!" and shoved one of her books in my hand.

"Oh, I definately want to buy this," I blurted. "Can you please sign it for me!"

"Oh no," she insisted. "This is my gift!" and she signed a copy of "She is Mine" to me and Luke.

I was beaming when I walked back to meet up with the others ... happy to tell them that I had met my new-found adoption hero, and chalked it up as another signpost along our journey!

Luke had attended the International Justice Mission Global Prayer Gathering in 2015 and after being so impacted by the event, bought me a ticket to attend with him in Spring of 2016! We flew to Washington D.C. the end of April 2016 for a 4-day weekend where we also enjoyed catching up with friends who live in the D.C. area. 

We spent 2 days before the event seeing historic sites and touring the Smithsonian Museums on the National Mall. When we went into the Museum of Natural History (the one featured in the film "Night at the Museum"), we were surprised to find a country exhibit on the second floor. Can you guess which country was featured?

"Oh, Luke! Let's go through the Korea one, first!" I was very excited, but clueless; till Luke informed me that it's a traveling exhibit and Korea was the only country exhibit featured in the museum that weekend. 

There was no doubt in my mind that God had given me another special sign post along the journey - for what else could explain how we "stumbled" onto the Korea exhibit in the short time window we spent in D.C.?? 

As we looked through the exhibit and realized what a rich culture and beautiful heritage our child would have, I was overwhelmed with emotion. I told Luke, "I almost feel guilty for taking them out of their home country..."

Adoption is always second-best to children staying in their original families in the land of their birth... no matter how much we love our child, we cannot fully replace any of that. Viewing the Korea exhibit made me much more committed to preserving as much of our child's culture as we can and to teaching them about their heritage. 

There have been many more "sign posts" along our journey... some of them may seem silly, but they all meant something to me!

When we traveled up to Naperville to get our photos and finger printing done for the FBI, my officer was surprised to see that we were Americans (probably the only Americans in an out-the-door line of immigrants). She was further interested to hear we were adopting from Korea and instantly said, "an-nyeong-ha-se-yo" (in Hangul: 안녕하세요) which is "Hello!"

At this point, I'd seen enough sign posts from God to come to expect them along the journey... so I immediately started laughing. Luke stuck his head around the partition where he was being printed and I said, "Of course, Luke. She's speaking Korean to me!"
I kept laughing, when Luke's not-as-friendly-officer barked at him, "Sir; please stand on the line!" and his head quickly disappeared.

The officer in charge of me had lived in Korea for a time and taught me the phrase. She mentioned a Korean Grocery Store not far from the office called Super H Mart. So, of course, we went! 

We bought some bamboo trivets made in Seoul, South Korea, for the grammies to use as reminders to pray for their future grandbaby (as if they needed a reminder! They're already so excited they can hardly stand the wait!) We bought some chop sticks to learn with, and some delicious produce we've never seen before: Korean Melon and Lycee. 

I continue to be amazed by the way that my God cares so supremely for us! He looks after every detail and surprises us with glimpses of His loving preparation of our 5th child. 

There's a Korean church literally a block (one block, people) away from our house. On Saturday afternoons they have a Korean cultural school that is open to the public where they teach Hangul (Korean lettering), spoken language, customs and celebrate the holidays. We can walk or bike ride to this church for services, cultural classes or special events as a family to preserve our child's heritage. 

Isn't our God incredible? He cares about every detail... He's carefully putting into place everything our precious baby will need when he or she makes their debut in America!

Square 1: Open Doors

The beginning of our adoption journey was definitely kick-started by the series of events that Luke described in his testimonyhttp://theschurterfamily.blogspot.com/2017/06/journeying-on.html?m=1... but there was still a lot of concentrated prayer and life circumstances that prepared us for our decision to adopt.

Our pastor began a sermon series surrounding The Daniel Fast in January of 2016. We decided in addition to a time of spiritual growth & prayer maturing as individuals, our personal focus during the Daniel Fast would be on the next big step for our family. Would we look seriously into purchasing a larger home for our growing family? Did God want to build our family through another biological pregnancy? Or should we adopt?

Toward the end of the 21 day Daniel Fast, we began to sense a strong peace whenever the subject of adoption came up... for a number of reasons we'll outline in this post, we were beginning to believe now was the season for our family to adopt.

We believe it will be beneficial for our children to bond at a young age and grow up with an adopted sibling. We sit in church behind our friends who have several adopted children and think, "Our family is supposed to look like that!"

We're so moved by the lyrics in Worship music about God placing orphans into families... The subject of adoption came up regularly in conversations with friends, on Christian radio programs, as well as at church.

Through the horrific child abuse call Luke had experienced at work, our family had started child sponsorship. Our family was now loving and supporting an unadoptable orphan in Darfur, Sudan through Make Way Partners and sponsored a sweet little girl and her family in Columbia, through Compassion International.

Our family was already serving in the ministry of Safe Families together... and we are Freedom Partners through International Justice Mission; a wonderful organization that played a huge part in Luke's healing from injustice burn-out.  

We had been attending International Talk Time on Friday nights with International Student Ministries at ISU (more about this fabulous ministry in later posts!) and loved watching our children interact with international students and the children of families who moved to our area for continuing education. And Luke and I both took a course called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement that was held at our church in the Winter/Spring 2016 semester.

We had attended the Connecting Hearts with the Forgotten adoption conference when it was held in our community, and learned more about caring for children from hard places by attending the Empowered to Connect Conference held at our church. The Trust Based Relationship Intervention we learned from Dr. Karyn Purvis at ETC proved to be vital parent training; not only in raising our own children, but in hosting children from hard places!

There could be no doubt that God had been in the process of expanding the borders of our hearts big-time and had turned our pain into a passion to help vulnerable children ... we knew adoption was the next logical step!

Luke said, "Suse - we can't mess this up. We're following God's heart - and if He doesn't want adoption for our family right now, He'll close the doors. If He opens them; we'll keep walking through 'em!" But how does one even begin to open adoption doors? I think the first one - our willingness - had already been opened, and we'd walked through it!

At a baby shower in January, I spoke with a sweet mama who had a house full of biological blessings but was now pursuing international adoption. She encouraged me to check out Loving Shepherd Ministries; an organization helping orphans and vulnerable children around the world. They had an online assessment form families can fill out to determine which country and adoption agency your family qualifies for.

In that very same weekend, the His Little Feet Choir sang and shared at our church. Their program was powerful; Luke and I pretty much wept through the entire service. Not only had our hearts been softening toward children from hard places for a while at that point, but adoption was weighing so heavily on our hearts that we knew we couldn't ignore it.

We had a family over for lunch after church; they have 1 biological child, 3 adopted children, and are also a Safe Families host family. I spoke with my friend about our strong adoption pull and she also mentioned the evaluation from Loving Shepherd Ministries. That was all it took! Two mentions in one weekend... I knew this was the first step.

Valentine's Day weekend, we made the decision to pursue international adoption (more on why we chose to adopt internationally, later). We got on the Loving Shepherd Ministries website and filled out their evaluation. A short time later, we received our results and were surprised to discover that we only qualified for only 3 countries!

Because of our keen awareness of child trafficking and human slavery, we were hoping to qualify for a country in Southeast Asia... but because we have 4 biological children, we currently only qualify for adoption programs in Bulgaria, Korea and Uganda.

(A friend had suggested we look into Kyrgyzstan: a country just starting to accept international adoptions; but after further investigation, neither one of us felt it was a stable enough program yet for our family...)

On one hand, we could look at our small list with disappointment - but we choose to be thankful that God narrowed down our choice of countries to help bring clarity to an otherwise immensely overwhelming task! 

I think I had a romanticized notion that the country we were supposed to adopt from would leap out at us and we would know instantly that was the place God had for our family.  I was quickly learning that this Faith walk was going to cover every square inch of the journey in our adoption! 

We decided to continue with Luke's open-door policy... and went ahead with further research into our short country list.

We looked into Uganda, but learned some families were experiencing significant delays in bringing their children home. We felt our children are too young to understand why Daddy and Mommy couldn't bring their new brother or sister home if we became involved in that program and ran into problems.

As in our research of Kyrgyzstan, we didn't feel like the Bulgaria program had enough stability for our family, so we checked that one off our list.

That of course, left only one option: Korea. It seemed as though the country had "found" us...

Praying that God would give us visible green-lights if Korea was indeed the country where He had a waiting child for us, we charged ahead into the unknown!

"For the LORD your God is God of gods and LORD of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe. He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing." - Deuteronomy 10:14

Safe Families for Children

"God sets the solitary in families;

He brings out those who are bound into prosperity..."  - Psalm 68:6

What does it mean to be the hands and feet of Jesus?

We grew up in church learning about Jesus, where He walked and had His ministry here on earth, and we know we're supposed to be like Christ in every way; but what does that look like in our day-to-day?

I had to come to terms with realigning my walk with my talk in a very real way over a year ago in the restaurant of a local hotel. It was there that we met our pastor and his wife to talk about a program called, "Safe Families for Children"; and I had gone prepared with lots of questions... and they were all written down, to be exact!

"Safe Familes for Children" was founded 13 years ago in Chicago, Illinois, by a man named Dave Anderson. Dave saw the gap widening between children who actually qualified for DCSF protective custody (i.e. they were being physically endangered by the adults around them), and children who had loving parents but were facing a personal crisis so overwhelming that they were literally unable to care for their own children.

Dave created a program where parents could voluntarily place their children into the care of loving, intact homes, where they could be cared for until the date agreed upon by both parents and host families. With their children in safe hands, the placing parents could now pursue areas they needed to work out in their lives to get their own homes back to a status where their children could return to a safe environment.

Safe Families is a remarkable program, mainly because it runs entirely on volunteers! No one who hosts a child ever receives a check (as in typical foster care) and the parents don't get incentives to achieve their goals before their children are returned to them. It's all voluntary. It's simply Christ's people stepping up to help a family who has no other support structure to fall back on. It's the Church being the hands and feet of Jesus!

I wish that I could say I wholeheartedly threw myself into the ministry of Safe Families - but honestly, I tip toed into it with a lot of hesitation. I questioned the legality of it all, wondered how the accountability worked, and was generally more concerned about outside influences on my own children, than for the children of hurting families.

Thankfully, our pastor's wife saw through my fears of the unknown, to my genuine desire to minister to hurting families and she spoke wisdom into my nervous little heart! 

My friend reminded me that when Christ stepped from Heaven into the darkness of this world, He did so, not to pluck us out of the darkness, but instead chosing to walk beside us while we were yet in the darkness - never leaving us or forsaking us; offering us His blessed Hope and salvation.

Slowly, I began to understand Safe Families was created to walk beside hurting families and be a safety net for them - someone they can trust to care for their children while they're working out whatever crisis is going on in their lives. Someone to talk to when they really miss their kids or have had a hard day and need encouragement! Someone to call when they've run out of money for diapers or need to find another place to live.

To date, Safe Families has spread internationally; serving over 24,000 children through it's program of Christian hospitality. And that's exactly what Safe Families does... give Christians a way to open up their homes in the Biblical spirit of hospitality; no strings attached, no expectations from the placing parents... just offering love to their children as Christ loved us! And the children we've had the privilege of hosting have blessed us, in as much as we've blessed them!

In 2015, our family hosted 4 children in 2 separate 3-week hostings, and 2 other sibling groups for 24 hours of respite care for another host family in our community. Luke and I quickly caught onto how the Safe Families program worked and fell in love with this opportunity for our whole family to serve God together!

Every child has a different background story on why mom or dad needed someone to care for them... and every child taught us how to love like Jesus loved.

Our own children learned that they're not the only fish in the sea and that mommy and daddy can love and care for other children; even those we've never previously met! I found that our children looked forward to having new friends come stay with us - and it was a blessing for me to talk with the placing mamas and assure them their children were being well cared for.

I encourage anyone who has ever considered caring for families in need to check out the Safe Families program! There is currently a tremendous need for more hosting families... as Illinois loses more and more control of their fiscal responsibility, DCFS is forced to resort to foster-care for children who only need respite or other social services. Families are being broken up unnecessarily and it is heart breaking to have to turn people away because there aren't families to take in their children.

We have a friend who recently took an Uber cab... in witnessing to the cab driver, our friend discovered that the driver was Buddhist. He stated he used to be a Christian; but left the faith because "Christians segregate their churches, and no body loves."

This should not be the way the world views the Church! We need to be the first ones to step in and help those in need - especially in our own neighborhoods and surrounding communities. 

Honestly; we can tell our children to be the hands and feet of Jesus, or we can show them what that looks like. Together as a family, we learned the joy of serving with Safe Families!