Testimony Tuesday is dedicated to sharing the stories of our grant recipients.  May you be encouraged by their stories….

 

We never had any intentions of adopting a child.  We can say with certainty that we thought adoption was a good thing, but never imagined it for ourselves.  We attend a church where adoption has not happened for a couple generations, and no one in our community or family contacts has been adopted, either.  So it was never on our minds or in our plans.

However, God has his own plans.  We were in the process of attempting to conceive our third child, and were unsuccessful.  Then two things happened.  First was the Haiti earthquake.  We were driving to prayer meeting one night, and Jason mentioned reading an article about the thousands of children who were now orphaned because of the earthquake.  “Would you take one?”  I asked him.  He answered yes. 

A few days later we began to see posts on a blog of some friends.  They were in Rwanda picking up their two adopted children and posting nearly every day.  The faces of these children and the experience of our friends adopting them really began to rock our world.  Suddenly orphans were on our mind as a present reality, not a foggy notion.  The Lord rapidly moved us from “That is an interesting possibility,” to “We need to do this as soon as possible.” 

The convictions that drove us were rooted in God’s word.  Suddenly adoption sprang out of the pages of our Bibles, and we saw how much God cares about the orphan.  We saw how much God cared about us when we were apart from Christ, and the price that our Father paid so that we could be adopted into his family.  We were also motivated by the fact that adoption was not a reality in our church; someone needed to do it!

God used all these factors to put hot irons in our sides.  We applied with American World and were accepted into the Rwanda program.  Two months later, however, Rwanda temporarily closed its doors, so we transferred to Ethiopia.  We are so excited to have the privilege of mimicking our loving father in adoption and look forward to finding out who our son is in late spring. 

When we began the process of adopting, we prayed that God would do “abundantly more than all we can ask or imagine.”  We never imagined how generous God has been to us financially.  The bills of the adoption were overwhelming, but we trusted that God, the Father of the fatherless, would provide what we needed to take in one of his children.  Through Katelyn’s Fund we can say he has answered our prayers of provision.  We are so thankful to have their prayer partnership and financial support.