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.
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