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 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.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment