Why Adoption?

There are two questions that we are getting a lot right now…(1) Are you unable to conceive? and (2) Why Uganda? The short answer is…(1) We don’t know, and (2) Because that’s where the doors opened. Now, if you want some more detail, read on…

When we were beginning to move from “friendly dating” to “this is the person I might marry dating”, we spent an evening asking each other the toughest questions we could think of concerning life, faith, and family. That night we found out that both of us, long before we had ever met, had a strong desire to adopt. As we continued to discuss this, we came to the decision that we would not try to have children biologically (unless the Lord intervened), but would instead adopt our children.

Understand that we are not campaigning against choosing to have children biologically, but we do find it sad that for too many people adoption is a “plan b”. Adoption is a wonderful opportunity for a family (even one with biological children) to welcome a child into their home who has no home and, consequently, little hope for the future. We believe this is especially true for the church, as we have been called to “look after widows and orphans in distress” (James 1:27). Having worked in children’s homes in China, Africa, and Central America, we have seen that the need is so great. The church cannot depend on UNICEF or the Red Cross to care for the children in need in our own country and around the world.

We had pretty much resigned ourselves to not being able to adopt for a while because of expense. Then one of our friends opened her own adoption agency, Promise Kids a Future. She was beginning to look at starting an adoption program to Uganda, a country she had worked in across the years. In conversation, she approached us with the possibility of adopting from Uganda, and we began to see ways that we (with God's help) might be able to make it work financially. After some weeks of thinking and praying, we felt that the Lord was opening doors for us to begin the process, which we did on December 6th, 2006. Our initial paperwork was sent to Uganda by the end of January, and we are being told that for other families it has been taking 8-9 months from that point. We expect to be able to travel anywhere from October 2007-January 2008.

We have applied for a male, age 18-36 months, so our son is living in Africa right now. We have started calling him Micah, which has helped to make it real for us, even though we don’t know him yet. It may not take long for our son to realize that he is not our biological child, since the resemblance factor should be a pretty stark contrast. However, we are looking forward to sharing with him how God has adopted all of us into His family. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (I John 3:1)