...And the Greatest of these is Love....

As promised, I wanted to share our story of this journey called adoption for our friends that may be interested in going down this path, for those that are just nosey, and most of all to bring glory to God for planting this seed in our hearts and watering it until it blossomed.

Back in the Day!

As with most journeys, this story started years ago, when I was in high school. My BFF and I would always talk about wanting to adopt a child. She knew some families from elementary school that grew through adoption, and I guess I just thought if my BFF thought it was a good idea, then it was a good idea!

Fast forward many years and milestones, high school, college, and graduate school graduations, and starting my career in Seattle; I met at least 4 leaders in my workplace that had built their families with adoption. All were international adoptions, but working side by side with them and seeing their passion for their children kept this desire alive for me. Small fast forward, to meeting my husband-to-be and in our discussions about children, we found we were both interested in pursuing adoption.

Central California

(fast forward noise again)...right before we got married I found out I had uterine fibroids. Not anything life threatening, just a huge annoyance that required a surgery to diagnose. When the grapefruits (fibroids), got too big, they were removed surgically and I was cleared to start trying to get pregnant. During this waiting game to get pregnant, we decided to look at adoption again and had a consultation with an agency in northern California. Because there was such a large need for adoptive parents for minority babies, they were quoting time frames as quickly as 3 months after finishing all the paperwork and home study...whoa!!!! I had just started a new job and the timing wasn't right, but we were educated on the process, and planned to come back to it. Well...God had other plans...I had to leave that job in about 6 months (a whole 'nother story); and literally on my way out the door of that "not so great" situation we found out we were pregnant with Kyan. Surprise!!!!

Indianapolis

So...as you can already see God is in control, driving this ship and out of nowhere an opportunity came for us to move from Cali to Indy (yes, pure craziness), but we went along.  Well KyKy as we call her was 20 months old and it was time to start thinking about another sibling. Well, wouldn't ya know I met another mom at the library that "was expecting" in a couple of months, ummm, did you say you were expecting??? Note: she was about 5'7" and no more than 110 pounds - huh??? They were adopting!!! She was like an open book, telling me they were adopting an African American child, their process took about 3 months and their agency needed adoptive parents that wanted to adopt African American children. She gave me the agencies number and I called and got their information packet.  Christmas was coming so I tabled following up til after the new year. We celebrated New Years with some close friends in the DC area and spent New Years Eve with some of their best friends that just completed their adoption of a little baby boy! She did not hesitate to share their story and suggested we look into Catholic agencies in Indy once we returned from our vacation.  Note: these meetings may seem random, but we firmly believe they were not!

The Beginning of our Adoption Process

Upon returning to Indy I found the only Catholic adoption agency in the metropolitan area and I signed us up for the March informational meeting. We meet their staff, learned about adoption law in Indiana and got our application packet. We decided that the if there was ever a time to do this it was now: this was the right agency, Indiana adoption law did a lot to protect adoptive parents and birth parents, and Kyan was now 2 years old and acted as though she was 18. It was time!!! We got our application turned in sometime later that Spring, and by August when we were preparing for some major vacations the social worker phoned us to set up an interview.  The social workers parting words on the phone were,  "are you and your husband open to twins???" Me: "umm, let me get back to you on that one". Seriously, I was laughing out loud! After re-working cars, bedrooms, logistics quickly in our heads, we decided we were completely open to it.

In the meantime, we had a mountain of paperwork to do and there isn't even enough room to talk about that whole invasive process. But over the next couple of months as we were getting all of our stuff together, our church started an Adoption and Orphan care ministry to be a catalyst for living out the biblical command to care for vulnerable children and orphans.  This was another sign from God that kept us encouraged and headed down this pathway.

While we were moving through paperwork, fingerprinting, and more paperwork, we met the twins birth-mom and she revealed the twins were both girls (uh-oh, two more girls) and she had about 14 more weeks left in her pregnancy. One thing we hadn't been perceptive enough to note was that she had no family or social support to lean on during this process. As a result, about 4 weeks later she just dropped out of the process and stopped contacting the agency. We didn't really know what to make of it. It was a little sad, but we hadn't bonded with her or the babies.  One of my best friends told me at that time, what God has for you is for you!

This is who He had for us, we just didn't know it at the time!

Sometime in November of 2011 we completed our home study and we were officially done with this part of the process and we could move on, enjoy Christmas, New Years and oh yeah...we could wait, and wait, and wait until we got selected again. No one knows the timing except God and that part in itself is nerve racking.  During the Christmas season at a children's clothing store I "randomly" ran into another young mom that went to church with us and we started talking and talking and found we had an uncanny amount of things in common (having lived in Seattle, attended the same university there, attended the same church in Seattle, married by the same pastor) unbelievable...I invited her and her daughter to our house for a play date and it turned out she was currently working in the adoption field. She had a lot of perspective and offered tons of encouragement. Just one other person that God used to keep us encouraged in this process.

After the holidays, sometime in January I was teaching a healthcare class and life was pretty calm, we were still just waiting. As I was sitting down to grade papers, our home phone rang which is unusual for the middle of the day. I picked it up and it was our social worker saying we had been selected. But that wasn't the biggest news, it was that the baby was due in 2 weeks. Say what??? After I got over my shock, I called Rob and made sure he was sitting down and told him. Soon we planned a face to face meeting.  After the meeting, we knew this time was going to be different for many reasons. We won't go into details about birth mom because those are private, but we will share that she selected us because we "just happened" to have her favorite bible verse on the cover of our scrapbook, "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love". 1 Corinthians 13:13.  We worked so hard on that scrapbook, but in the end we said we just have to be who we are and not spin anything or try to guess what things would make us more appealing to birth parents. Well we did exactly that, we stayed true to ourselves and God used that in this selection process.

The baby was due February 14th, so just getting to that date was painstaking, but then guess what, she was 2 weeks overdue...more waiting, more opportunity to worry, but also opportunity to give it over to God. By this time we had shared what was happening with our small group from church and we had additional people praying for us. So on Monday February 27th, birth mom was induced and Kyndall was born at 11:58 pm totally healthy. We were there for it all, the pushing, the birth, the celebration, and then the reality that there was no room for us in the hospital so we had to go home and we still had one more huge hurdle to overcome - in 24 hours birth mom had to sign the consents. More waiting...and it almost looked like it wasn't going to happen, so panic and fear set in. It got really hard to trust God but He set some things in motion and Wednesday evening March 1st, we brought Kyndall home.  It wasn't how we envisioned it, we didn't have the infant car seat with us, we had to use Kyan's convertible car seat (chewed up goldfish cracker crumbs and all in it), I didn't have my "big" camera to capture it all, and by the time we drove all the way home to exchange car seats and went back to our cousins' house to get Kyan, she was already asleep for the night so Kyan had to meet her new little sister the next morning.  God does His best work through imperfect circumstances, so it can only be attributed to God. And just to give some context, this entire process was completed within slightly less than 1 year from when we went to our first orientation at the adoption agency.  Yes, we went to orientation March 5, 2011 and on February 29, 2012 we brought Kyndall home!

After reflecting, and writing this all down, I know that I know, that I know, that this was all orchestrated by God, every up, down, high and low. In fact, the husband of one of the ladies I mentioned earlier asked us whether we had written this story down, because it is an illustration of what a mighty God we serve. He was so right. At the time, I hadn't written anything down, I was tired and delirious from having a newborn and a 3 year old at home. But it had to be written, even if it is a whole year after Kyndall's birth.

Thank you for listening, and if you have an inkling in your heart, don't ignore it...that would be taking the easy way out; God has called us to do far more than we ever thought we were capable of!