The number one
question we have received in the last two weeks is “Why did you choose
adoption?” This is a question we don’t
mind at all and are happy to share what led us towards choosing to start our
family through adoption. It’s a long
story, as it’s been a few years in the making, but here it is…
At some point
during our time in Korea the idea of adoption came up between us. Honestly, I think it started out more as a
joke because our first group of students was just so cute we thought it would
be fun to bring a couple of them home with us!
But during that time the idea of adoption continued to quietly stir
inside both of us until we started talking about it a bit more seriously. We started thinking that maybe someday we
really would like to adopt a child, most likely from Asia. But it was still just a distant thought for
the distant future.
After we left Korea
we traveled to a few other Asian countries, one of which was Cambodia. We both agree that this was probably the
place where it hit home for certain in both of us- the timing might have still
been unknown, but there was no doubt in our mind our hearts were being pulled
in the direction of adoption for a reason. Cambodia was the deepest poverty we
have yet to see. Barefoot children
scavenging a table at an outdoor restaurant, hoping to collect any food scraps
or aluminum cans before the table was cleared.
Young, school-age girls spending the day from sunrise to sunset at the
temples with their baskets of postcards and magnets trying to win the
sympathetic heart of a tourist who would buy something for a dollar. It was impossible to not feel their hunger
and their pain pulling at your heart strings.
This was when the thought of just how many children, orphaned or
abandoned due to poverty, there are in the world without anyone to love them
and care for them. How many of them would benefit so greatly from a loving
family to call their own? Maybe we
really were being called to have a family that involved adoption, and change
the life of even just one child in the future.
We knew at that point that only time would tell when this might happen.
Fast forward about
a year a half and we knew that we were getting closer to really wanting to
start our family soon. Eric would be
finishing school soon and we would both have careers that we loved. We still talked about adoption frequently,
but also went back and forth trying to decide if we should adopt first or have
biological children first. We both
constantly felt pulled towards adoption, and Eric’s mind was made up. He knew that pursuing adoption first is what
we were being called to do. I, however,
just wasn’t quite sure if it was really what we were supposed to do right now,
or just what I thought maybe we wanted to do (I’m the one who likes to see the
door WIDE open before I step through it!).
So I began praying that God would show me just once more that adoption
was truly the path we were supposed to take at this time in our life, if it was
meant to be. It didn’t take long because
very shortly after, the media started reporting on the Zika virus in Central
America and how it could be passed on to unborn babies even when the mother
didn’t travel to an affected area herself.
Eric would be spending six weeks in Guatemala this spring to finish his
schooling. And just like that God had
thrown the door to adoption wide open for me to see. So here we are.
“There are no
unwanted children, just unfound families.”
No comments:
Post a Comment