Our Story

     A lot of you may be wondering what possessed us to pay a blasphemous amount of money and travel halfway around the world to bring home our new daughter.  We already have a beautiful, perfectly healthy daughter.  We're not infertile.  We can have more children.  Why not just have more kids? (yes, we've received all of these comments and questions so far) The simple answer is that God imbedded this little girl into our hearts.  It wasn't like one of those commercials for Orphans International where you see the spokesperson asking you to pay a quarter a day to sponsor the skeleton-looking child he's holding and you think, "Oh, how sad...hope somebody sponsors him..." and change the channel.  It was an all-consuming grief for this little girl halfway around the world whose family is so impoverished that they are forced to relinquish or abandon their daughter in the hopes that another family, halfway around the world, will give her hope and a better future.  We thought about her, this little girl who may not even be born yet, day and night.  What does she look like?  Where is she sleeping tonight?  Did she have enough to eat today? We prayed, lost a lot of sleep, wondered how in the world we were going to pay for it, and then submitted our application to the adoption agency.  I think the reasoning behind our decision can best be summarized by a passage from The Strength of Mercy by Jan Beazely:

    "Although it may not always be obvious to us, there seems to be one distinct moment when God begins a new story in each of our lives.  He writes words on our hearts that long to be spoken and strain to be lived out."

     We decided, in that distinct moment, that we couldn't be the family who said, "Oh, how sad..." and moved on with our lives.  This is our life, and we can't just change the channel when we don't like what we see or are afraid to go into the unknown.  No, we don't have all of the answers, like where the next payment is going to come from or what we're "getting into".  Yes, we already have a beautiful, perfectly healthy baby girl, and yes, we can have more children....and we're going to.  We don't know her name, what she looks like, or if she's even been born yet, but we do know that she's our daughter and until we can hold her in our arms, we hold her in our hearts.