LIGHTING the WAY

First of all, THANK YOU for your interest in our journey! Your encouragement, blessings, and prayers touch our hearts and are appreciated more than you know.

Now that our adoption plan has been “officially” announced, we have been flooded with congratulations, well-wishes, and of course, questions. So, I wanted to take some time to address some of the most common questions we’ve received:

• You’re adopting? Cool! Is that because you can’t have biological children?

The short answer is no. Adoption is not a back-up plan for us. We don’t view it as a secondary way to build our family. It is our firm belief that the purpose of adoption should never be to provide children to a family, but to provide a family for a child who needs one.  It is something that we both have desired since before we were even married, and we have always known that we would adopt “some day.” We have a biblical mandate to care for orphans, and adoption is just one small way that we can be involved in that. It is a blessing beyond measure to be able to provide a stable, loving home for a child in need. Through a great deal of prayer and discussion, we have come to the conclusion that now is the time the Lord is leading us to begin the adoption journey. We also know that biological children are a possibility for us, and if God chooses to grow our family through that route as well, we trust Him to bring that about in His timing. The more the merrier!

• ­Where?

We are actually pursuing two adoptions simultaneously: one domestic and one international. For the international one, we are adopting from Uganda. Surprisingly, the international adoption is expected to be a much quicker process than the domestic one, so for now we are focusing primarily on that.

• How old is the child?

For the Ugandan adoption, he or she will probably be somewhere between 5 and 7 years old.   Technically, according to Ugandan law, one of the adoptive parents needs to be at least 21 years older than the child to be adopted. Although the courts can choose to waive this requirement, we prefer to stay within that age range so we have one less unknown variable when we get to our court hearing in Uganda.

For the domestic adoption, the child will most likely be an infant, although there is a possibility of adopting a somewhat older child. The agency we are going through works with birth mothers facing an unplanned pregnancy who want to choose adoption for their child, but they also partner with the local department of human services, finding families for children within the foster care system.

• What agency are you using?

We are not using an agency for the Ugandan adoption. Our dear friend Kevin runs The Greenhouse Orphanage in Kampala, Uganda, so we are able to adopt from that orphanage independently. For those of you who have kept up with our travels, this is the same orphanage that Brandon visited in 2008, and we also led a team through Xtreme Impact to this orphanage in 2011. Most of the pictures in our announcement video were from this orphanage. We are hoping to adopt one of the children we met while there in 2011. Doing it “on our own” means more work for us, but it also means lower cost, and potentially a quicker process.

For the domestic adoption, we are going through Crisis Pregnancy Outreach (CPO). It is a completely volunteer-based agency that began as a crisis pregnancy center in 1983 and grew into an adoption agency as the need arose. You can learn more about this agency at their website:  http://www.crisispregnancyoutreach.org/index.shtml.

• Where are you in the process?

Although we have been working on the adoption (researching, gathering information, making decisions, etc.) for several months, we are still in the early stages.  Right now, we are waiting on our home study to be finalized. We have completed all the necessary visits and have turned in all of the paperwork, but are still waiting on a few background clearances to come through and the actual write-up to be completed. The next step will be applying with U.S. Customs & Immigration to be approved as adoptive parents.

We know that adoption can be a very long, time-consuming, heart-wrenching, and costly process. But in the end it is so worth it. We ask you to please partner with us in this process through your continued prayers and encouragement. We will definitely need it! We are also planning some fundraisers soon, and would love if you could spread the word when the time comes. We will share more details on those as we get them ironed out. And we would love to talk with you more about the process! Please let us know if you have other questions you would like answered and we will do our best to address them.