Saturday, July 14, 2012

In Case You Missed It...


This is my adoption testimony I gave tonight at the fundraising dinner.

This past year has been a huge year for me.  I have been following Paul around in the Bible over the last year in Bible Study Fellowship and God has taught me so much through this man’s life.  After Paul turned his life over to God, he was used in amazing ways and God has used Paul’s life to encourage me and show me what a life fully given over to Jesus Christ looks like.  During that time, I also did Beth Moore’s study on James and if you have never studied the book of James, you need to.  Wow…that is a book that will open your eyes and convict you like no other.   God used James to teach me that we are all called to care for the poor without exception and that we are not just to read the Bible and know what it says but to actually do it!  And then I did Kelly Minter’s study on Nehimiah and God has spoken the same message about adoption to me through all of these studies this year.  I have been praying that God would break my heart for what breaks his and wow, did he do it. 

I am going to back up a few years just to give you a little background on our decision to adopt.  Adam and I began praying about adoption about 4 years ago.  A lot of you know that Adam and I used fertility medication to conceive both of our children and I often wondered why God made us wait so long and go through all of that when he was going to bless us with children in the end anyway and now I know.  If he had not put us through that, we may have never looked at adoption.  We prayed about adoption before I got pregnant with Eva and then when I got pregnant, we stopped.  Then when Eva was about 8 months old, we started looking at adoption again and praying about it and then we put it back on the shelf when I got pregnant with Eli and then in January of this year Adam and I decided we would begin to diligently pray about whether adoption was what God was calling us to and this is what I have learned over the past 7 months. 

I have prayed every morning that God would speak to me through his Word and through his people and he has amazed me!  I began to look into some statistic on orphans at the beginning of this year and I learned a lot!  There are somewhere between 143 million and 151 million orphans in the world right now.  Orphan being a child who has either lost both parents or been abandoned.  This was such an eye opener to me.  While studying the book of Nehemiah this year, I learned that Nehemiah was an Isrealite that also held the position of cupbearer to the king of Persia and along with this position he lived a life of luxury in the palace.  When his brother visited him from Judah, Nehemiah asked about the condition of Jerusalem, he wanted to know how they were doing and once his brother told him about the state of Jerusalem… Nehemiah knew he needed to do something to help them.  Nehemiah taught me that with information often comes responsibility; if we know, we are be required to do something and I very clearly heard God asking me,  now that you know there are this many orphans, what are you going to do about it? So I began to pray about orphan care.  I asked God whether he wanted us to adopt or to just send more money.  I told God I wasn’t sure we could do an adoption.  We didn’t have enough money.  I was worried about what would this do to our family, to the two children we already have?  What would this do to my life?  I felt like God answered this question while studying his word early one morning.  I read a verse that morning that I have probably read hundreds of times before but that morning it had a whole new meaning to me.  God laid 2 corinth chapter 8 vs 9 on my heart.  It says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.  I immediately knew that God was saying to me…I left heaven and came to earth for you.  Enduring shame, hatrid, and even death so that you could live a better life. 

So I knew that God was asking us to do something but I still didn’t know what so I asked the question of God…are we to adopt or just send more money?  I am sure that I was secretly afraid of what he would answer with but that very morning, when I got off of my knees, I opened my Bible to the verse we were to study that day and it was Nehemiah 2:17,

You see the trouble we are in…Come, let us rebuild.  Nehemiah didn’t merely send help from Persia, but he chose to share in their suffering and recovery process.  I really felt God say to me that morning – Don’t just send money to them, do something.  So I began to pray that God would speak very loudly to Adam J 

One night while Adam and I were talking about adoption again, Adam told me that he was afraid of not being able to complete this because honestly we do not have the money to do this and then he asked me if I felt like God would look at this as bad stewardship?  25-30k is a lot of money!  You can do a lot of other things to the glory of God with that money.  Is this what he wants us to do with his money?  This was on Saturday night and so Adam and I decided that we should pray about it so we did together that night and the next morning, I asked God again if this would be his choice for his money and on Sunday morning, Stafford talked about  assigning value to an object very briefly in his message to us.  He explained that something has value based on what you would pay for that object.  He went on to say that we had amazing value in God’s eyes, each one of us because God paid the ultimate price for us.  He gave his son for you and for me. This message probably had a very different meaning to everyone else at Summerdean that morning but to us, I felt God say how important his child is for us and that he has paid way more than 30k for one of his children.  He gave his son…what wouldn’t he give for us?

After praying and praying, Adam asked me one night in the kitchen….so how many do you want?  I can’t explain how excited I was!

At the end of that week, Adam and I decided it was time to tell our parents so we asked if they could come over for dinner on Saturday night but they were busy so we had to settle for the next Tuesday.  I was a little bummed b/c if you know me, once I have heard from God, I want to get the ball rolling but we would have to wait and boy did God have a reason for waiting.  He knew that I was a little worried about telling our parents and what they were going to think and Monday night at Bible study, the night before we were going to tell them, part of the video we were supposed to watch was about a couple who adopted an orphan. They explained how God called them to adoption and what a blessing it had been to them and I was overwhelmed by his timing on this!  How cool is that?  I knew that after seeing that video, they were going to be fine with it and Susan even asked me if we had decided to adopt before I saw that on Monday night.

This is one of the many reasons I know without a doubt that God’s timing is perfect.  I have seen it many times over in my life.  Now that I have children, when something happens to one of them there is a feeling that stirs inside of me that I can’t explain.  It is like my heart breaks a little when something bad happens to them.  When they take bad falls, it takes my breath away.  When they are really sick and I pray for them, my heart is just heavy for them.  I have been doing a lot of research in the last year into orphans around the world and especially in Africa and the thought would enter my mind every once in a while…what would I do if that were Eva or Eli?  I could not wrap my brain around the pain it would cause me as their mother to know that they were hungry and have no food or to know that they were sick and there was no medicine and possibly no one to hold them and love them.  And then I felt God speak to me….he said, these are my children.  I am watching them starve to death, I am watching them die of preventable illnesses and you are supposed to be my hands and feet in this world.   

So I have asked myself why do I feel like we should adopt an orphan and this is what I have come up with so far.  Because of Paul who taught me this year that my life is not my own, I was bought at a price.  I am here for a purpose.  Because of James who taught me that pure religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress and because he calls us to be doers of the word, not just hearers, Because of Nehemiah who taught me that with information comes responsibility,  Because of Jesus who told us he would not leave us as orphans, that he would come for us, and the final reason and the most important to me is simply because I know that he told us to….and so we are. 

Then we watched this short video... 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nVn8BDCmQM&feature=related

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