Aubrey and I have an announcement…
we have decided to pursue infant adoption.
Allow me to add some context…
Broken Hearted
Aubrey and I have three wonderful children. We started having children after being married for three years. It was our intention to wait to have children. We also stopped having children after our first two and then decided later that we weren’t quite finished. After a miscarriage God blessed us with our third. We arranged to have a tubal ligation during the planned c-section to prevent any further pregnancies.
Aubrey and I have both become remorseful over those decisions. The decision to limit when and how many children we had and the final decision to stop having children. If we could go back and do it all over again, we would not put any limits on when and how many children God blessed us with… they are a blessing.
God is sovereign. We take great comfort in that knowledge. He is not a weak God that could not have prevented us from stopping Aubrey’s womb. That isn’t to say we blame God for our decisions, but we know that He works all things together for our good (since we love Him and are called by Him).
So, here we are wanting more children without the ability to have any … biologically.
Open Hearted
We have always, more or less, been on the same page with respect to our views on adopting children. We wholeheartedly supported others that felt the call to adopt, but we could never imagine adopting a child into our family. If we were ever to adopt children, and we couldn’t fathom that, it would have to be a work of the Lord Almighty. He would have to change our hearts.
Well, He did.
Over the past couple of years we have become friends with several adopting families. We have prayed for them, supported them and rejoiced with them. I believe God has used this to soften us towards adoption. He has used our remorse and probably a dozen other things that we don’t know about to soften our hearts towards orphans, towards children who either have no family or will have no family upon entering this world.
Heart for Orphans
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. — James 1:27
We know that God has a heart for widows and orphans, for the outcasts of society, for the broken hearted, meek and lowly. His Word says that religion that is pure and undefiled before God is to “visit orphans… in their affliction.” Aubrey and I both profess Christ as our Savior and we both believe that the Bible is God’s Word.
If that is true, then this is an opportunity for us to walk out our faith in an extremely practical way. We can be a father and mother (and siblings) to a child that might otherwise have no family at all. We can take a child that may have been raised in a secular home and show them Christ. We can pour out our lives sacrificially for our children, including the children God has yet to bless us with, all to the praise of His glorious grace!
How Can You Help?
So here we are at the beginning of the adoption process. We have gone to an initial orientation meeting and submitted a formal application to get the process started. Adoption can be very expensive, and the route we have chosen is certainly beyond our immediate budget. We will need to ask for help in this and trust that God will provide the means. We are still prayerfully researching what that looks like and will provide updates as soon as we know more.
For now, please pray for us. Prayer really does help, and we need all the prayer we can get.
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Until next time, God bless.
Photo Credit: MWE.Daniel via Compfight cc