The David & Kathie Steinberg Family
Children: Alex 17; Christopher-Ryan 14; Lyriel 13; Keira 10; Sophie 5; Lily-Mei 4;
Our new additions: Kai 2; Skye 4
Church: Grace Fellowship Church, DeMotte, IN
We are the Steinberg Family. We would like to share with you our adoption story. We, David and Kathie, met at Vacation Bible School when we were 14. High-school sweethearts became a young married couple in 1994 when we were 20 years old. When we were 24, God did an amazing work in our lives by bringing us our first son, Alex. You see, we had been told by 2 different physicians that we would not be able to have children. We began fasting and praying, knowing that God wanted to do a work in us. He healed us and we were further blessed with four more children: Christopher-Ryan, Lyriel, Keira, and Sophie. Our children are a gift from God and are the result of God moving in a miraculous way. After our last child, Sophie, was born, we truly felt that we were done having children. In fact, we began looking forward to emptying the nest a bit and relaxing! We turned our thoughts towards lives of comfort like: “Hey let’s finish the basement” or “we could refi and build a nice garage. God had other plans and began to whisper… Now, up to this point in our lives, our only involvement in orphan care had been to give funds to charities that supported working with orphans. We thought the idea of adoption was great, but really didn’t think it applied to our family. We already had 5 children. However, God began to lay on our hearts two things: the desire to love and parent another child and the waiting children in China with special needs. In fact, during a summer break, we felt strongly that God had a daughter waiting for us in China. We took time to pray (a lot!) and discuss the idea of adoption with each other and our children. The Lord showed us that we as a family were called to do more than just support orphan ministries. We are called not to lives of earthly comfort and things that only last for a short time. He wanted to once again do a work in us and bless us with children. We brought home our daughter Lily-Mei from China in August 2013 and have been amazed at her transformation since coming home, as well as the transformation in our hearts from all that God has done in her and our lives. We are amazed at how much love God has given us for this sweet and spunky little girl and how much we would have missed if we hadn’t stepped out in faith when He laid adoption on our hearts in the first place. It has truly been a joy watching her integrate into our family and our whole family, including extended family, embrace her as well. It’s been such a beautiful picture of how much God loves us unconditionally regardless of who we are or where we come from and how He adopts us as His own sons and daughters when we accept Christ as our Savior! We have been amazed at how God used this process to reveal that surrendering to Him will lead to blessings beyond what we dreamed. Every time David comes home from work and Lily runs to greet him yelling “Daddy! Daddy!” is a precious moment that only an adoptive parent or child can truly appreciate. In the summer of 2014, we began to feel that maybe God was calling us to adopt again. We took the month of July to pray and seek His will. We talked to the kids about how they would feel if we did this. A key moment was actually one night when our daughter Sophie broke out in tears crying that she wanted to bring home another sister. This time we felt God strongly telling us to adopt two children. The story of how our new children were matched with us is too long to add here; however, by the end of September we had already been matched with our son and daughter, Kai and Skye. We leave Sunday June 21st to go to China to get our new children!. Everyone in our family is very excited about these 2 new little ones and are very eager to make them part of our family!
