the orphan

That's the name of the first song I heard after meeting Mason. I hopped into my mom's car that she had let me borrow that night, giddy that I had just met the man I was going to marry, and popped my Newsboys CD back on, and there it was. That song has always been special to me because of the memories it carries, but now I see just one more amazing thing about the night God brought us together. He joined us so that we would be adoptive parents. At the time I didn't think it was anything but a beautiful melody to punctuate a beautiful night, but it was perfect foreshadowing of where He would take us together!

We discussed adoption during our first year of marriage, in 2007, and maybe even before that. I jokingly yet seriously told Mason that I would prefer to have a biological child first so that I could make sure I was a fit mother before adopting, kind of using our own flesh and blood as the guinea pig to see if I was responsible enough to take on someone else's flesh and blood. I now see that's kind of ridiculous, because there are so many children that need parents right NOW, they surely wouldn't want us potential mothers to be sitting around waiting to get pregnant before we came to get them. But, that's what we did, and anyway we were so young when we had Ezekiel (almost 23) that we wouldn't have been accepted as adoptive parents at that point. In fact, we're just now making the cut this year, 25 and (almost) 5 years of marriage! WOOHOO!

When Ezekiel was about 10 or 11 months old, the three of us were in Lifeway Christian Store together, and I passed a title that caught my eye: "Successful Adoption" by Natalie Nichols Gillespie. On the cover was a lovely photo of two fair-skinned parents kissing their sweet Asian baby girl. I don't think I bought the book that day, but later I told Mason that I had felt strangely drawn to it and really believed I should go back and purchase it. I did, and I remember saying to myself that if God wants us to have that book, it'll be there on the shelf right where I saw it; and of course, there it was. I read it in a matter of a few days, then Mason read it, and we sat up late many nights talking about how we were going to adopt. Domestically, we said, for sure - after all, there are plenty of babies here in the U.S. that need homes, and after all, we really don't like to travel. It's cheaper to adopt domestically (usually), and we could go through the foster system, too. With that being our decided stance, we found a wonderful Christian agency and I started e-mailing with them about their domestic program. After a few informative e-mails, we stopped to pray about when to make a move and get started on this journey. The next month, we found out we were pregnant with Eden! The LORD is so very clear sometimes. This wasn't the time to adopt, it was our time to grow and deliver another baby. She's a wonderful addition to our family, and when I watch her and Ezekiel play and snuggle together, I know that Eden is not only a gift to Mason and me, but also to her big brother, as he now has a best friend. I said many times during her pregnancy "I'm NEVER doing this again!", which is a common statement among pregnant mothers, but I was and still am at peace with the idea that I may not give birth to any more children. I can, and I might, but it's not something I yearn for. I yearn for more children, but not for the physical process of getting them here. So, we are certainly not planning for any more biological children in the near future.

Now Eden is between 10 and 11 months old, the same age Ezekiel was when we took our first step toward the action of adoption. The last couple of weeks have been a blur, in a good way, with so much happening in our hearts and of course so much happening every day with our two little E's. What I do remember and want to record is about this November. Did you know it's Adoption Awareness Month? I just found that out, which is cool because we have definitely been aware this month. On November 17th, our church held a Women's Night Out with the theme of Orphan Care. I had never attended one of these events because I associated them with the, ahem, older crowd, and their topics had never been of much interest to me. This one, however, I wanted to attend because I thought I might gather knowledge on ways we could help with the worldwide orphan crisis. Well, Mason's schedule, which is very unpredictable, wasn't looking good for me being able to go that evening, and we don't use babysitters for our children. I was hanging out at the playground with them that afternoon while Mason kept me posted on efforts to get himself out of a flight crew so I could go. He really wanted me to go, but I figured hey, if God wants me to go, He'll make a way. Sure enough Mason got out of the flight (even though he really needed it, and had to answer a supervisor's question of "can't you get a babysitter?"), which was absolutely essential to the rest of this story. His willingness to follow the Holy Spirit's lead at his own expense is what makes him such an amazing husband and father. I went with my good friend Jacque, and I think we both knew God was going to do some crazy stuff that night. There were 3 speakers featured that night: one social worker who spoke of showing tangible love in Jesus' Name to orphans at home and abroad, one mother of 6 (3 biological, 3 adopted), and one elderly woman who shared her life story of being adopted as God's child as she lived her entire life as an orphan. The adoptive mother's story was life-changing for me. She wasn't the first mother I'd heard of with this family situation; Steven Curtis Chapman, pretty much my favorite artist ever, has the same setup, down to the 3 youngest being adopted from China. However, this was the first time I'd heard a full testimony like this. She spoke of a lifelong inclination of her heart toward orphans and showed pictures on huge screens of the moments she first met and held her daughters. At the right exact moment in her speech when I was saying, "Ok, LORD, this is all really great and moving stuff I'm hearing and seeing, but what am I supposed to do? Eden's not even one yet! Can we do this?", she said that she also had a one-year-old at the time of her first adoption. People surely thought she was crazy at the time. That topic of craziness came up again, as our wonderful pastor's wife later mentioned that she thought the same thing about a family in our church that just welcomed their new son (4th child, 1st adopted child) from Uganda. Then it occurred to me that, to quote Steven Curtis Chapman: "It's crazy but it's true, you really don't know love at all until it's making you do something crazy." Mason and I like to joke about what to do to make people think we're crazy, and we desperately want to love with Christ's love, so this is a perfect motto for us. So at the end of the night, we had the opportunity to fill out prayer request cards that some ladies from our church pray over on a regular basis. I furiously scribbled out something like "We KNOW we need to adopt, but my husband has a job that deploys and I just don't know how it will all work out. Please pray for God's wisdom for us and that He will show us His timing."

Within a couple days after that event, I was perusing our agency's website on international adoption. Same agency God led us to in 2010, but totally different direction, and we easily and quickly agreed we were ready to move on it (thank you Jesus for hearing and answering our prayer!). Somewhere along the way, the idea of domestic adoption at this point in our lives fell off the table. I can't even fully explain why or how we chose to go international, but I do know that God has recently made this world shrink in our minds. It really doesn't make a difference where our next child comes from, just that we defend the cause of the fatherless (Isaiah 1:17) and look after orphans in their distress (James 1:27) if we claim to know or love God at all. His heart is for the orphan. It's clearly displayed throughout God's Word, the Bible. We have His heart because He lives in us, therefore we can't NOT do something for at least one of these precious children of His. Prayer is so powerful. Those ladies' prayers for me, someone they've probably never met, went straight to my Creator, and we are no longer concerned at all about the deployment schedule or Mason's job. In fact, his job is a perfect reason in favor of us adopting. God has given him the means to support a growing family, and an orphan needs a HOME and a FAMILY, two things we have by His grace. Mason's deployments, whatever comes of them in the future, are not a valid excuse to put off adoption. God's got every detail worked out ahead of time. Now is clearly the time to dive into the process, and God is so faithful to have communicated that to us!

We've just started the adoption process through Lifeline Children's Services' South America program. We're in the Peru program but are keeping our hearts open to Colombia and praying about which one to choose as we get further down the line (we would really appreciate your joining us in this prayer!). We're expecting the wait time to be about 2 years, but we know it could be shorter or longer depending on God's perfect plan. We're praying for our child already and ask you to please do the same, if you would; pray for His protection over him/her and preservation from harm, as the longer a child is in institutional care, the more they suffer developmentally and emotionally. If all goes well with Peru, we will be spending about a month there to pick up our child when the time comes. This will be our first time out of the country, and this is obviously the only thing that will get us out of this country, as neither of us has ever left it. We hope this will be the first of many times, as the experience will undoubtedly fan the fire of our desire to live out Jesus' Great Commission (to make disciples of ALL nations). We know this process will be very expensive, probably in the neighborhood of $30,000 before potential tax credits. But we know that God will provide, as He meets all our needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19). He's led us here, He's NOT going to leave us! If you have any great ideas for fundraisers, please let us know!

Thanks for going on this journey with us. We're SO EXCITED!