The Back, Back, Back, Back Story

Orphan care (the umbrella term given to seeking to help children who have been deprived of parental care, either through death, abuse, neglect, abandonment, or any other means) has been a part of our lives and our story and our hearts for the entirety of our marriage. We worked together at the first Royal Family Kids’ Camp our church did (18 years ago) as a newly dating couple. We have continued to work these yearly camps, the middle school fall weekend retreats, and serve on the Leadership Board in the years since.

I have felt a call on my heart to adopt since I was 12 years old. I didn’t just feel called, I KNEW that adoption was going to be part of my life story. I didn’t worry too much about when or how, just knew it would be. Kraig and I discussed this when we were dating and newly married and we were both on the same page. A couple of years after we married, we knew we were ready for kids. We talked about it and decided that, although we knew we wanted to have biological children, the best order to go about things might be to adopt first, then have biological children. With that plan in place, we started the PATH classes through our local DCS with a decision made toward the end of that to pursue the foster-adopt path (fostering a child who is in a situation where it is likely parental rights will be terminated).

However, because our timing and our plan is not always God’s, everything changed pretty quickly after we completed the classes and the homestudy. I had some medical issues and my doctor told me that if I wanted to have biological children, I should do so sooner rather than later. With that news, we dropped the adoption plan for the time being and pretty quickly got pregnant. I always assumed that we would return to adoption when our girls were in lower elementary school.

Again, my timing, not God’s. For whatever reason, Kraig never felt an urgency or a call to return to adoption. For years and years, I chomped at the bit and stewed and sometimes pouted and fussed and worried over the time that I felt was slipping through my fingers. If I’m being honest, there were times it could have been a source of contention between us if I were married to someone like me. Instead, the way it always went is that I brought up adoption, Kraig didn’t really engage in conversation or shut it down pretty quickly, and then I silently questioned how God could call one person in a marriage and not the other.

Over the years (approximately 8 years of feeling it was time without being in agreement to move forward), that call and certainty from my 12 year old life evolved into doubt and then into a Promise. As I struggled in the frustration, God started to speak to my heart in so many ways. He made it abundantly clear that He was in control. He also made it abundantly clear that an adoption was still in our future, but I only needed to be still.

Every year at Royal Family, my desire was revived and the burden was heavier. Every year after Royal Family, I would bring it up again to Kraig and every year it seemed to fall flat. In all of those times, God would use something to remind me that our future and the future of our family was in His hands. I remember one day in particular, and she probably has absolutely no memory of this at all, but I ran into the parent of a former student in Target on the Monday after Royal Family. Her girls were both grown up and in college and she and her husband were foster-parenting. We talked for a long time and she told me that she had always wanted to foster parent and her husband was never open to it. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he said to her one day, “Let’s foster parent.” She had no idea what her story meant to me at that particular moment. I left Target, got in my car, and cried at the goodness of my Father. That was also a defining moment for me in regard to timing and logistics. I had always assumed we would adopt a child around 5 or 6 but we wanted our kids pretty close in age and Emma and Kelsey were getting too far past 5 and 6 for that to work. In that moment, I realized that we might end up adopting an older child, or that we might not adopt until Emma and Kelsey were teenagers or in college. The little picture I had in my head of the way things should go started, at that moment, to fade and be replaced by the vibrant but as yet blurry masterpiece of the plan God had, even at that time, already ordained.

A little over four years ago, I read a book by Jen Hatmaker called 7. This week, I am having the students in my CLIMB group do a little activity in which they identify 8 major events in their lives, then come up with a song for each event, ending with a sort of “Soundtrack of their Lives”. I did it along with them and one of the defining events in my life was reading that book because it completely shaped the course of the rest of my life. As an almost direct result of reading that book, I went on my first mission trip as an adult. We went to Cambodia that next year and spent time in two orphanages which just furthered my passion for adoption. (Cambodia is actually closed to adoption, so it has never been an option for us, but spending time with and falling in love with the kids there has deeply impacted our family.) The following year, I returned to Cambodia but this time was accompanied by Emma and Kraig. I have no doubt that the two of them were as deeply affected as I was through that opportunity. Two years later, this past summer, we returned a third time, this time with Kraig again and Kelsey instead of Emma. Our girls have been as passionate about adoption as I have been for so many years and these trips as well as hearing about Royal Family over and over have solidified their desire to share their home with adopted siblings.

As for me, God has used these past four years to show me what it means to rest in a Promise. Some days were easier than others. But just when it seemed that my hope was fading, He would send a sermon about trusting the dream He has given you or a conversation with someone or a passage from the Bible that I have never before noticed or read in quite the same way. Throughout this time, He has been helping me learn to be still and wait. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am still learning this lesson in a million different areas of my life and likely WILL BE learning it for the REST of my life. It is NOT something that comes easily to me.)

For the past year and a half, I have not mentioned adoption to Kraig at all. In this period of time, I have clung to God’s Promise. In fact, about two years ago, I prayed very specifically for one of two things to happen: for God to either call Kraig to adoption or for Him to remove the call from me. It was a painful prayer to pray, but I was living in a painful middle place and I was too weak to stay there. Two years later, God has answered that prayer. And in the way God so often does, He has answered it BIG.

This is a shirt I made in 2014 as a reminder to myself that His Promise WOULD come to pass.

I ordered this bracelet last year from my favorite Etsy shop, Farm Girl Paints, to encourage my heart to keep the hope.