So, as you can tell from the title, we are beginning an adoption journey. As I look around for other blogs and information, I don't see many who include the process of getting up to the point where you have an agency. That's where we are right now. We thought you could just have the homestudy done and then choose where you want to adopt from. As it turns out, each country has its own requirements, and sorting them out is lengthy. We thought...wrongly...that because of the sheer number of orphans it would be a relatively simple process to connect parents to children. Anyone who has already gone through the adoption process is probably getting a good chuckle out of that. :)
We hope to adopt from India or a Spanish-speaking country. We would like to adopt 2 siblings together and have them both be under the age of 5. We have been told repeatedly that Ethiopia is the easiest place to accomplish this goal.
India turns out to have pretty strict rules. Right now anyway both parents have to be at least 30 when they are united with the children and have been married for at least 5 years. The good news is we can start the process when we both turn 28 with one agency (Dillon). So, that would, for us, mean waiting another year (or 3 if we go with a different agency) to even get started.
We have a trip to India planned for this Christmas/New Year's, so we are anxious to go and meet people there and experience the country firsthand. We hope it will help us better understand the culture and the people. Actually, the trip is sort of what got us thinking more seriously about adoption. We had been considering idea around for a year or so, when one weekend this spring, I couldn't seem to stop thinking about it. Something stirred in my heart. As I grew in knowledge of poverty, human trafficking, and the number of orphans needing home, I grew angry about these injustices. I asked God to do something about it, to hear their cries. I suddenly became acutely aware that the child I am going to adopt "someday" could very well be alive already. And then the mama bear instinct kicked in. I began to understand that God feels that way about each of these children, that he passionately loves them and cares for them. He's asking us to be his hands and feet to show that love, and so began a more serious inquiry of what my part in this would be.
In August I won a trip to India to work with orphans... http://www.mnnonline.org/article/13041
and the 3 bedroom house that we had fixed up and intended to sell as an investment property wasn't selling so the "we don't have room" reason disappeared. Not to mention while we were fixing it up "for a young family" I was subconsciously imagining how great it would be for a family, and realized that could be our family!
So, we began to ask a lot of questions. And we continue to ask them, trusting that the Lord will guide us & thankful for friends who listen along the way.
