Our first post-the reason for this blog....

To our friends and family who will read this blog, we hope you will be blessed as you follow along on the journey we believe God is leading us on... the journey of adoption.  As a married couple, Andrew and I have pretty much always considered that we'd both be open to the idea of adoption one day.  But we were spurred onto the idea when the pastor of our former church home, David Platt, encouraged and arranged for local foster care/adoption agencies to hold training classes at the church.  Andrew and I both felt that God could be calling us to be foster parents and or adopt, if not immediately, then definitely at some  point in our future.  So with that, and the fact that God provided for us to find wonderful childcare for our boys while we were in class, we signed up to take the GPS classes from Alabama Baptist children's home in the spring of 2010.  The classes were wonderful and prepared us for the many possible issues that foster and adoptive parents (domestic) may face.  However, even though we both felt like we wanted to be a foster family or adopt, we did not feel that God was calling us to either of those at the time.  So from then on, my prayer became, "Lord move us to adopt or become a foster family when you want us to.  We want to do this, but being already so content with the precious boys we have, and being such an overwhelming process to get through, we will need you to energize us to begin this process."    


So the Lord has answered our prayer this December 2011 in that both of us feel as though the Lord is ready for us to begin the process of adoption.  For me personally, it has been like a hefty dose of baby fever, only in my mind the little girl(s) we hope to adopt are not infants and look nothing like either of us.  I have dreamed and pictured in my mind little girls of various ethnic backgrounds and have wondered how they will feel to become a part of our family and to leave the cultures they have lived in.


So where do we go from here?  Currently we are still praying through what country to adopt from and our next step will be to talk to an adoption agency.  Right now we are leaning toward China, where so many girls are aborted, abandoned, or killed in infanticide due to the one child policy in the urban areas and the preference there is among parents for boys.  Truthfully, we are open to adopt from any country the Lord would show to us, but in particular to countries where life, and specifically female life is devalued.  We would love to adopt from India, but that process is currently on hold.

 Zechariah 4:6 ..."Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts."