Waiting - An Adoption Story
Adoption is a beautiful and scary process. It's a faith-building, perseverance-making, trust-molding journey. And it's God’s plan, and His is the best kind of journey we can join. After hearing so many adoption stories, I quickly learned that no two were the same and God was going to create a unique and special story to tell through our family.
My husband, Chadd, and I first started talking about adoption when we were engaged in college. We each had experienced the tug on our heart while on separate mission trips to orphanages in Central America. We agreed that one day we would pursue adoption to add to our family, but wanted to wait until after we had biological children. Flash forward eight years, and we now had a 3-year-old son, Emery and a 1-year old daughter, Addilyn. Life was good but we felt like our family just wasn’t complete. God made it very clear to us that now was the time to start pursuing adoption but not international like we had originally thought. Summit’s heart for foster care and adoption showed us how many children were right in our “backyard” needing a home. So on Orphan Sunday that year, we contacted an adoption agency Summit partnered with and started the process.
After completing the home study and what felt like a mountain of paperwork, came the hardest part of all... the waiting. It was during this part of the process God started to refine me and show me so much of His character. Every single thing was out of my control and I had to rely fully on His plan for my family. There were moments of frustration because I had heard of stories where people got matched with a baby right after finishing their home study, but God gently reminded me that this was our story not their story. I had moments of feeling rejected when a birth mom didn’t choose us but God reminded me quietly that that was not our child but was someone else’s. And then when a year had passed, and we had to update our home study, my heart hit an all-time low. A year of waiting felt like a long time. I knew God had called our family into adoption, but I just couldn’t understand why nothing was happening. Then one morning during my quiet time, I opened to Psalm 27:14 which says, “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” I literally felt God speak it directly to my heart and a peace came over me reminding me that God’s plan was perfect and I just needed to sit back and wait.
A week later, we were presented with four different children not even through our adoption agency in a matter of two weeks! I even held one of them in my arms but knew none of these were our child. Then a few months later, a year and a half after we started this journey, a young pregnant mother, already with a 1 year old, wanted to meet with us. I remember on our 3 hour drive to meet her and her mom, how nervous and excited Chadd and I were. We started talking about possible baby names to try to distract ourselves. We didn’t even know the gender but I had a strong feeling it would be a boy, so we found one we both agreed with and little did we know what a sweet God moment that would be for us. Shortly after meeting the birth-mom, we realized she went by her middle name not her first name which just happened to be the meaning of the name we had chosen for this baby!
The call to confirm that she had chosen us to be her unborn child’s parents is a day I’ll never forget! Just that morning, I had read Isaiah 25:1, “O Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.”
The story God was weaving for our family was one He had known all along. And just two months later, we held our sweet, red-headed baby boy in our arms for the first time almost 2 years after we started the process!
I feel forever indebted to the strong and courageous young women who chose to give us a piece of her heart to forever care for. Nothing about adoption is easy but it is one of the biggest blessings so far in our life. Beckett has brought our family so much joy and I wouldn’t change any detail in our story. The waiting made us stronger in our faith and in our marriage. No other child could have completed our family. God knitted our hearts together just like I had prayed for from the start. Our journey has truly just begun, as we still have a lot more uncharted territory to enter but we know God is trustworthy and faithful to lead us on this path and complete this beautiful story he is weaving for His kingdom.
-Andrea H.