The Jeremy & Sarah Hartson Family
Children: Taylor 18; Jacob 13; Hope 9; Judah 7
Church: Faith CRC, Pella, IA
We are the Hartson family. We first began thinking about adoption years ago when we had two children and had struggled to carry a baby to term. After three miscarriages, we thought adoption might be what was next for our family. We inquired with a local adoption agency about the process and cost and decided we didn’t have the resources at that time. We went on to have our third biological child and thought our family was complete. However, Sarah continued to feel like someone was missing in our family and talks began about adoption again. After years of prayer, Jeremy finally came to the same conclusion. We adopted our son, Judah, from Ethiopia in 2011. We decided to not put limits on what God wanted for our family and remained open to the thought of another adoption. During Lent in 2013 we both decided to really pray about whether God wanted us to adopt again. We felt very strongly at the end of that time that we were to be open to adoption again. We didn’t know how we would do it financially, but prayed that if God was calling us to it, we needed to trust in that. We began our paperwork in April of 2013 and felt like Ethiopia was the natural choice again. However, after waiting months for a referral, Sarah started to look at the Waiting Child List within our agency. In July 2014 she came across a little girl, who was 6 at that time. She had so many characteristics of each of our children we knew she would fit in our family. We inquired about her, but found out she was from South Africa. That meant we would have to redo a lot of paperwork and have some added costs to switching to a different country. Our agency contacted us a month after our initial inquiry and asked if we were still interested because they felt this little girl would fit well in our family. We prayed about it and realized we always said we wanted to be a family ready for a child already waiting, not a family waiting for a child. And, so began our process to bring our daughter home. We updated our home study, completed a new dossier for South Africa and will hopefully be leaving very soon to bring our daughter home. Having Katelyn’s Fund support our family financially has taken away some of the burden of wondering how we are going to pay for this adoption. It has been a blessing to know that we also have their spiritual support and that they have been praying for our family along the way. We know God has used Katelyn’s Fund to help tell our story and bring Him glory! We are thankful for Katelyn’s Fund and all that they have done for us.
