So Our Journey Begins

As mentioned in the previous post, adoption has been on our minds.  It has been on mine since I was a little girl.  I always knew I wanted to adopt a child and when I met and married Matt, he too had the same desire.  We thought we would have a few children biologically and then adopt a few more.  Although this was our plan, God had something greater in store (because his plans are always best)!  

Let me backtrack a little and bring you up to speed.  Matt and I both have always desired a big family.  We would have started expanding our family as soon as we married, but with him in school and me working, we decided to put that on hold for a little while.  After about a year of marriage, we decided that God knew the best time for us to have a child, so we were going to leave it in his hands.  We stopped all forms of pregnancy prevention and expected to get pregnant soon after.  Over a year later, we were still without a child.  We decided to make an appointment with an infertility doctor and found out that Matt needed surgery.  After his surgery, we thought we were well on our way to expanding our family!  Indeed we were, just not in the way we thought!  A short month after his surgery, Matt left for 2-weeks of intense discipleship training in Texas.  This took place in May.  While Matt was away, God was dealing with both of us.  God placed a man in Matt’s path while in Texas who runs an orphanage in Africa.  Through his interactions with this man, Matt started giving more serious thought to adoption.  He admits that he was a little nervous about sharing this news with me, but did anyway.  He came back from Texas and shared with me that he felt the Lord speaking to him about adoption.  To his surprise, I had been feeling the same thing!  Not only had God been speaking to both of us about adoption, but he also laid on both of our hearts to adopt 2 children!  We spent the majority of the summer talking about this decision and praying about it.  Several times throughout the summer the Lord would speak to both of us separately, but when we would share our thoughts with each other we realized that we had been receiving the same message from the Lord.  It has truly been an amazing experience.  Because of this, we felt full confidence that we should precede with the adoption.  Not AFTER biological children, but NOW!  So we praise God in all circumstances, even infertility, because we know that his plan never fails and neither does his love and provision.  

In August, as I was starting back to school and Matt was starting a new job, we began the adoption process!  The Lord has led us to two children in Ethiopia!  We haven’t seen them yet, we don’t know their names, but we are already crazy about them!  We have our final home study visit on Tuesday and then start all of our paperwork. Please pray for us as we travel this journey.  Pray for our children.  Our hope is to bring them home sometime during the summer of 2009.  And so our journey begins…