Hi!

I’m not sure exactly when my desire to have a large family was born. I don’t even know if it was at one specific time, or if, as our family was gradually expanding, it was an evolving thought. But at some point after my husband, Nate, and I had five biological kids I began thinking a lot about adoption. It dawned on me that we wouldn’t ‘accidently’ adopt; that it would take great intentionality, time, and money. While it’s one thing to be open to the idea of adoption, there are many steps to take before it can become a reality. But all of those thoughts were actually kind of bittersweet because I felt a strong conviction to not bring this idea up to Nate.

 

This took place sometime in 2009 and we had been married approximately 14 years at the time. I knew that Nate was naturally a people-pleaser and that his inclination would be to accommodate this desire I had, especially if I linked it to a spiritual calling. I mean, no one wants to stand in the way of what God is doing, right? And if it would make your wife
‘happy’, all the better!

 

But I knew that adoption would be a journey with ups and downs; that there would be times of questioning

and frustration. And to encourage us and spur us on we would each need to independently know

God’s hand of involvement in order to keep moving forward. I deeply desired for us to make this decision

as a couple, and for that to truly happen the Lord’s Spirit allowed me to know that I shouldn’t broach

this topic with Nate.

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Looking back, during the time leading up to desire to adopt, the Lord had been pursuing me in a variety of ways. I was raised in a believing home and had been attending Bible-teaching churches for my entire life. As a young child I asked Jesus to be my Savior, but that had mostly been because I didn’t want to go to hell as opposed to being the impetus for any sort of true life change. Even as an adult, Nate and I and the kids were very involved and committed members to a believing church, but as I got more and more involved in a ladies bible study, the Word started coming to life for me in a new way.

 

The Lord really caused me to see my brokenness and the effects of my sin; I started to care about his precepts

and wanted to learn more about true obedience as a way of living. In short, I started learning more

about how following Jesus could be a way life for me and it was abundantly clear what I had been missing,

and that I had essentially been ‘white-knuckling’ my faith.

 

I had been trying my best, in my own power, to do the right things and make the right choices. Before this bible study, I was having thoughts of, ‘Is this really ALL there is to Christianity?’ Currently I realize that it is humanly impossible to go any length of time before the resolution fails or the disciplined behavior fades, but back then it was all I knew Christianity to be! Thanks be to God for breaking me and bringing me to such disappointment so that He could show me a new way.

​

So back to the adoption calling, He was giving me a chance to trust Him on my new journey of learning what it looked like to love God and to love his Word. I would journal every so often my prayers and the adoption prayer always followed the pattern of asking the Lord to change Nate’s heart and to help him bring up the topic of adoption, or to take the desire away from me. I was very sure that it was going to be me that He would remove the desire from, because with five children and our busy life, why in the world would it ever occur to Nate on his own that he would want to adopt? He had never expressed a desire to have a large family, and he was also on a different sort of faith journey than me. The brief number of times I attempted sharing a little about what I was learning in bible study seemed to fall flat and I couldn’t seem to gain traction in discussing my new discoveries. Months went by, maybe six or seven, and I continued to pray about this at least once a week.

​

One night in the early spring of 2010 we were going to bed and Nate, who had attended a men's bible study that evening, said he had something he promised the guys at the group that he would tell me. This sounded sort of daunting and I really had no idea what it would be; I wasn’t necessarily thinking that it would be something positive, however. I braced myself for the information, and he began by saying that he couldn’t stop thinking about the recent earthquake in Haiti. Specifically, he was thinking about the children there who may have lost their parents, and that God was putting on his heart the desire to look into adoption.

 

I could hardly believe what I was hearing! The Lord was answering a huge prayer right before my eyes

and I was dumbfounded. 

 

I immediately got my journal to show him some of my adoption prayers that I had written. I was of course emotional about the whole thing, and in my overwhelmed state one of the things I did was to talk about something completely random and mundane that Nate needed to handle the next day. It was a complete mood-killer, and I told him at some point later on that I must have made that awkward comment because I didn’t know how to handle the goodness of God in this situation. We laugh about that part now, but it just reveals how stunned I was at the time.

We started taking steps by meeting with other couples who had adopted and tried to glean all of the information we could, combined with praying about where to adopt from as well ask asking the Lord for the money to meet the expenses that would be involved. We were able to bring our daughter, Patricia, home from Uganda in January 2011, about ten months after that memorable night.

 

Our family uses this story to remember God’s faithfulness and to encourage us regarding his future faithfulness

 because we are so prone to forget His intimate involvement in our lives.