For those of you who might not be as familiar with our heart for adoption I feel I should back up and tell you a little about our decision to pursue this. Back in college we were very blessed with the preaching and teaching and personal examples of pastors Dr. Tony Merida and Dr. David Platt. Both of us were convicted through sermons of theirs on the needs of orphans around the world (one I would highly recommend can be found here). So from the time we were dating it has been on our radar as something we wanted to do in the future.
One day during my last year in college I found myself walking though our church bookstore and a found a table with recommendations from the pastor. A book caught my eye and I found myself almost through the first chapter before I realized I should purchase the book if I was going to read it. This book is called "Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian families and Churches" by Dr. Russel Moore. It talks about our adoption into the family of God and how that should move us into action. You can find this wonderful book on Amazon for under $11 here. This book pushed us that much more into taking the act of adoption seriously.From the first night of marriage during our family bible time we began praying for the Lord to bless us with children and the ability to adopt. The question wasn't ever if it would happen but how the Lord would accomplish this in our lives. As we began to look at the practical aspects of adoption the financial aspect seamed almost impossible (with international adoptions being a minimum of $20,000). Looking at full time ministry as the being the rest of or lives we were tempted to put it on the back burner and stop looking at adoption seriously. Thankfully the Holy Spirit continues to work even when we are discouraged and managed to spark the idea of Foster Care. A quick google search on foster care in California quickly felt like a dead end too. Somewhere I found that they look for people with at least 10 years of parenting or childcare experience. That is clearly not us. We've never been parents and certainly don't have 10 years of childcare experience each. However, even when we are not expecting it God is always working everything together for Good for those who are called according to his purpose. Randomly I met a guy at church who had worked for a foster care agency (on a night I almost skipped out on!). I shared with him our desire to adopt but the lack of experience. He quickly shared that somehow I had found miss information and that I should look into it again....
Low and behold I found the official website for our county and we were more than qualified!
We found out that there was a monthly informational meeting so we picked April 24th to attend.
Stay tuned for Part two with what we learned and where are we going from here!
No comments:
Post a Comment