Reflections on our Adoption Journey

This is part four of a series of posts about our how we got started on the road to adoption and some things that we've done along the way that I didn't have time to write about at the time because I was swimming in a sea of paperwork.  You can find the other posts here.

How we shared the news with our families. . .

We had told our parents that we had though about adoption, but we waited until our application had been approved with our agency before telling them that we were adopting.  We decided to send them a letter in the mail.  I found this paper at Office Depot, and that is what we printed our letter on. 

Here's a portion of the letter:
"We have some exciting news to share with you.  We have been talking about starting a family for well over a year. . . We realize that God has blessed us with so much – God fearing families, a stable marriage, good jobs, a home in a safe neighborhood.  We hope to use what God has blessed us with to make a difference in a child’s life.  Through adoption, we hope to be the hands of feet of Christ to a child.  The Bible has a lot to say about caring for orphans.  Here are a couple of examples.

James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Deuteronomy 10:18 He (God) defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.

We have not written off having a biological child one day, but we hope our first child will be adopted.  We have applied with Bethany Christian Services to adopt from Ethiopia, and we just found out that our application has been accepted."

Along with the letter, we sent a small Ethiopian flag - to serve as a reminder to pray for the child that would one day be a part of our family.  We also sent our parents a copy of Adopted for Life, by Russell Moore.  We had read the book, and we were touched by it.

We packed up the letters and flags and sent them to our close family - aunts, uncles, grandparents, James' bother, and some of our cousins.  We mailed our parent's packages a day or two before everyone else's because we wanted for them to receive the news first.  We told them to expect something in the mail from us, and we asked them to call us when they open it.

My parents got their package first, and James' got theirs the next day with the rest of the family soon following.  Everyone was thrilled.  Our parents did share some of the same concerns about having an interracial family that we had ourselves, but they were delighted to know that a grandbaby was finally on the way.  It felt great to share our news and it felt even better to have the support of our family.  We had been praying for several months about adopting from Ethiopia, and we had been praying for God to give our families the same convictions that He had given us.  It was so encouraging to see Him at work in the hearts of our loved ones.