I want to take you for a little ride through our adoption journey. We have adopted seven beautiful children over the past fifteen years. There is a special story with every adoption and our journey is no different. It is a bumpy one with lots of twists and turns. I often compare it to riding a roller coaster, exciting one moment and absolutely terrifying the next.

I feel adoption and pain go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other. When we found out we wouldn’t be able to have biological children, we had two choices:

• Become bitter, risk losing our marriage and whatever God had planned for us
• Mourn our loss, ask God for direction and His will

Our Story

When I was a little girl I dreamed of being a mom. When someone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, becoming a mom was the first thing out of my mouth. I wanted to feel what it would feel like to be pregnant and experience childbirth with my husband. The whole package was my dream and I didn’t want to have any regrets.

When Rick and I got married twenty-one years ago, we both wanted to start a family. I wanted three kids and he wanted two. We did have some idea from the beginning that things may be difficult for us in this area and it was.

By the third year of our marriage, we had ruled out the possibility of having a biological child unless God performed a miracle. We had grieved and struggled our way through infertility. We knew it was very hard on a marriage and did everything we could to safeguard our relationship but it was hard, very hard.

The Call to Adoption

Rick had some business meetings in California and I had the opportunity to go with him. Since I was going to be staying in the hotel most of the time, I packed a whole bunch of books to occupy myself. Sitting beside the pool that week was when God began to deal with my heart about adoption. I was reading a fiction series by Gayle Roper, an adoptive parent who had written adoption into the series. I was intrigued.

I began to think and pray about the prospect. As I prayed, I began to get excited because this could be our answer. Yes, I would have to give up the whole pregnancy dream but I could do that. And maybe, just maybe, during the adoption process, I would get pregnant. I have to admit this was a part of my thought process too.

When we got back home from our trip, I decided to approach Rick with the idea. I had no idea that generally, the man in the relationship was hesitant to adopt so I thought he would jump on the idea.

So I asked him… Do you want to know what he said? Nope! Without even thinking about it he said no. I was devastated but I remember just asking him to do me one favor. Would he pray about it and see what God would want?

You see, I would love to tell you that I am the perfect wife who doesn’t nag and just simply asks God to work on my husband’s heart without trying to fix things myself. Well, I’m not. In fact, I’m the opposite of that. I am a problem solver by nature, so just sitting back has to be an intentional choice on my part.

But you know what? God is in the details. I just happened to be reading the book Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian and learning not to nag your husband is one of the concepts she teaches. She encourages you to simply pray for him. Did God really expect me just to sit back and not try to change my husband’s heart? Yes, he did and so I began to pray.

I am very fortunate to have a husband who will give me whatever I want if it’s within his power. As I’m sitting here writing this I can see God’s grace and direction in allowing me to pray instead of nagging because otherwise, it would have gone something like this… I would have begged, nagged, pleaded, and bargained. My husband probably would have given in but it wouldn’t have been with a willing heart. In fact, there would have been a lot of resentment and anger towards me and an already tough situation.

Adoption is hard and it is so important for both parents to be one hundred percent in for it to be successful. Hurt and resentment within our marriage was not the foundation I wanted for this journey.

Rick did as I asked and prayed about it. Within forty-eight hours, he came to me and told me God had changed his mind. He was willing to adopt!

I was elated! We could still have the family we’d always dreamed of!

Finally, We Were Parents

We did our research and started the process. Our first adoption was a private, domestic adoption. This is where we as the adoptive family write a letter to the birth parents and it’s put in a book. We wrote the letter from our hearts promising to love the child as our own and prepared to wait. They had warned us that families waited for years to get picked so we settled in for what we thought would be awhile.

Do you remember what I said about God being in the details? Well, the day our letter went into the book was the very day our birthmother walked into the adoption agency. Wow!

When we got that phone call, I was so excited and scared all at the same time. We scheduled a time to meet with her. She interviewed us and chose us to be the adoptive family. At this point all we could do was wait because you see until the parent’s rights are terminated after the birth of the child, they can change their minds. By faith, we began to buy all the baby stuff and decorate a nursery for him to come home too.

Sam was born on the cold, cloudy Friday after Thanksgiving. We were camping in Branson when we got the call that he was healthy and had no complications. I remember being overwhelmed with joy that we were finally parents!

But in these types of situations, you hold back a little, no, a lot because things can change in a blink of an eye. You love the kiddo so much, but you can’t be all in until you sign on the dotted line on adoption day. It is such a nail-biting experience!

Fast forward, we brought home Sam at six weeks old and officially adopted him ten months later. Talk about feeling complete! He made our dreams come true and I can’t even explain how much I love this kiddo!

A Call to Foster

When Sam was about five years old, we decided to check into adopting again. Rick’s magic number was still two but I really wanted three kids. Sam was very anxious to have siblings and I wanted him to have the opportunity to be a big brother.

The plan came to a grinding halt when we found out the cost of special needs adoptions had tripled since we had adopted Sam. The subsidies had changed a lot and they were no longer available. Rick and I did not want to go into debt to add more children to the family.

I began to pray and research our options and landed on foster care. Our friends and family were supportive but definitely concerned. We assured them we would be okay because we were going to just adopt and didn’t intend to foster. You can be licensed with the state as an adoption only family and we thought that was the way to go. It seemed like the safest thing to do.

In order to become licensed with the state of Missouri as foster/adoptive parents, we had to take what is called STARS classes. As we started taking these classes, God began to tug on our hearts to consider fostering along with adoption. He was calling us to trust him and go somewhere we said we would never go.

Foster care was one of those things we said we’d never do for all kinds of reasons.

• We couldn’t give the kid back
• You never know what kind of behaviors and trauma you’re going to deal with
• We couldn’t imagine dealing with the birth families on a regular basis

These were all valid concerns but the things I thought I couldn’t do were the things I became passionate about in foster care. I began to love not only the kiddos but their families too and I felt we could make a difference.

We did have to give some kiddos back and it hurt. Not only did Rick and I feel the pain but our children did too and I think that was the hardest part. We loved them for as long as we had them and I will never forget the imprint they made on my heart or our family. We learned to deal with so many behaviors caused by trauma. I have to admit this has made us both better parents. We have a lot more patience and sympathy for those around us. We saw the birth families on a regular basis and learned to cultivate the relationships between them and their kiddos. I learned to enjoy sharing their children with them and how to treat them the way I would want to be treated if I was in their position. There was so much value in not “staying safe.”

Foster Care

If you ask Sam, he will tell you he prayed for every one of our kiddos. We went from one kid to five kids in one year. When we had four kids under three, I begged Sam to stop praying because I needed to catch my breath.

We were foster parents for over eight years and we joke that the kids just kept coming. It’s hard to say no when those numbers have little faces. We said we will stop at four, then five and then finally at six, we gave our notice, we were done.

Just to make sure everyone was on the same page we even told God we were done and there would be no more children for us.

That was a mistake! You should never tell God what to do. Plus, I didn’t realize it at the time but Sam was praying for another baby. While we were waiting for our court date to adopt our sixth child, we got a phone call that her biological sister had been born and needed a home.

I knew from the moment we got the phone call we were supposed to trust God and just say yes. God gave us our bonus baby and we couldn’t love her more. She completes our family and has Sam wrapped around her little finger. Honestly, she has us all wrapped around her little finger.

Plus, we are suckers for biological siblings and feel they have a right to be raised together if at all possible. That is a very special bond!

The Purpose in our Pain

When we realized that we couldn’t have children, the pain was unbearable for me. I had two choices:

• I could become bitter and refuse to consider God had a different plan for my life
• I could submit to whatever He chose for me and strive to be in His will

Submitting to what He plans for your life is a process that takes time. In fact, I knew I was called to be an adoptive mama but I didn’t completely submit until about 3 years ago when I was studying the book of John. A part of me always hoped I would get pregnant and still have that experience. It wasn’t until this moment that God healed my heart and made me see I wasn’t missing out.

In John, chapter nine, Jesus heals the blind man who had been blind since birth. The disciples begin to question Jesus about who had sinned, the blind man or his parents. Jesus told them that neither had sinned. In fact, this man was blind so that God’s glory could be shown to everyone.

It was at this moment, that I realized that there was nothing wrong with us. I had always interpreted our infertility as a weakness, sickness or that we were not good enough but actually God had done it for His glory. It was at this moment I gave it all back to Him. All my dreams. All my plans. All my hopes. Whatever He has planned for me, I will submit.

Psalms 37:4 talks about God giving us the desires of our heart as we delight in Him. Often times we think this means He will give us whatever we want and that is not the case. If I am delighting in someone, I am taking into consideration their wants, desires, and aspirations. This is what happens when I delight in God. As I draw closer to God, His will for my life becomes my desire. He begins to change my heart to align with whatever His plans are. It’s not about me but about Him.

Frankly, His ways are not our ways. Every single one of our kiddos has an amazing story where God specifically gave them to us and called us to be their parents. I trust that and know He is in the details.

There is nothing wrong with me. I am enough because He is enough. He has called me to love other people’s children and to do it well. It’s my life’s calling and ultimately, the purpose for my pain.

Thanks for reading our story! It was very emotional for me to write as I reminisced about what God has done for us. I love these kiddos, every one of them. I am so thankful God has called me to be their mom. You see, we are often reminded about how we changed their life by adopting them, but as you can see, they have changed mine!