If you’ve been following us on our adoption process, you’ve read the why and the where, and now, would you consider being a part of the “how” piece of our adoption?  There are two specific ways you can join with us in this mission to rescue our child in Zambia. Today we will outline the first way, prayer. Tomorrow we will share the second way you can partner with us.

Paul calls us in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 to “Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”  Will you join us in praying earnestly for…

1. Protection and health for our child in Zambia.  Pray for wisdom and strength for her caretakers.
2. Every one of the 1,000,000 orphans in Zambia.
3. This last leg of our adoption process: that US Immigration Services would process our application quickly, that our paperwork would be received favorably in Zambia, that God would continue to provide reliable contacts in Zambia to help us and for the timing of this whole process that our child would be approved for international adoption when we arrive in Zambia and that God would lead us directly to her.
4. Us…that we would have wisdom and patience as we pursue our child all the way to Zambia.  Pray for Jeremiah that he would begin to understand what is happening and that he would be able to adjust well to all the changes in the coming months.
5. Finally, please pray that God would provide the funds to bring our covenant child home this spring.

Thank you for your prayers. We covet them deeply and cherish knowing that you are walking this journey with us.

A couple of nights ago, in a time of family worship, Kim, Big J and I were singing “Jesus loves the little children.”

Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Many of us learned this simple song when we were kids and we are enjoying teaching Jeremiah those same songs we learned as kids. But as we were sitting there singing, that picture of God’s family really struck me. Revelation 5:9 declares that God is making a people for himself from every people, tribe, tongue and nation. All children – red, yellow, black and white – are all precious in God’s sight.

Such a simple song. Such profound implications. I don’t really have a deep point except to say this. People often ask us why we are adopting internationally. This song is the answer.

A few months ago, as we were announcing our plans of adopting from Zambia, Scott, the student pastor at Covenant Life, made the comment that one day we will have a black kid. Certainly, I knew that, but his comment really struck a new chord in me. That black kid is part of our family. We want our family to look like God’s family with red, yellow, black and white being precious in our sight because they are precious in God’s.

As we have shared previously, two months ago, we received a shattering email that the adoption agency we had been working with was closing their Zambia program effective immediately. We were left with two options: choose a different country or proceed with an adoption from Zambia on our own.

And here is where God has proven himself faithful to us: he never left us to proceed with the adoption from Zambia on our own. Yes, we are proceeding without the aid of an adoption agency, but we are not alone. We have been in ongoing contact with two families that adopted from Zambia this past summer and both couples have made themselves available to support us and help us however they can. Kim mentioned in her last post that I returned from traveling over Christmas to find a card on my desk with a money order for $500 to help us with our adoption. The card was simply signed “your Covenant Life family.” No, we may not have an adoption agency, but we have people around us who love us, care for us and are walking alongside of us. For that, we are forever grateful.

Yet, still, while those contacts have been an encouragement to us, there still seemed to be this big void when it came to on the ground logistics in Zambia. Honestly, we have absolutely no idea what it will be like: where we will stay, what we will do each day, what the process looks like. The families that have gone before us have painted a picture of their experience, but their first admission was that they walked this path with equally little direction.

Last night though, I spoke with Brian. Now, if ever we were unsure of 1) whether or not we should proceed with Zambia and 2) how we were going to do it, this conversation with Brian reminded me that though this is so foggy and unclear to me, God is faithful, good and knows exactly what is going to happen. Brian, you see, is the guy who cuts the grass at Covenant Life (the church where I serve as XP). It “just so happens” that Brian’s wife is from Zambia and that he grew up in Zimbabwe, just across the border from Zambia. His parents are still in that border town and heavily connected in the capital of Zambia, Lusaka. Lusaka is precisely where we will be going. I had heard Brian was from that area, but knew little else until that phone call last night.

After I called him a couple of days ago, he called back excited to hear about our adoption. In fact, he was jealous that we would be headed to Lusaka and wished he could stow himself away in our luggage. Unsolicited, Brian made mention of a mission guesthouse of which he was aware and of a missionary couple who has been in Lusaka from some 20+ years. But, according to Brian, his parents may know even more helpful contacts. He said he would speak with them and get back to me with some names/numbers/email addresses as recommended by his parents.

Do we know where we will be staying or what each day of our trip to Zambia will be like? No. But this we do know: God is faithful and, once again, he proved to us that he is leading this whole process. He even arranged for our grass guy to have contacts in Zambia. That is not an accident. That is the provision and blessing and our Lord. Our child is in Zambia waiting. We just can’t wait to go and wrap that precious child in our arms. And we will go knowing that the Lord has been faithful to us and to this child throughout.

It has been, admittedly, way too long since our last update. For a while, that was simply because there wasn’t much to say. We were going through the adoption process: filling out paperwork, completing the required online training and waiting for our homestudy to be completed. Eventually, we reached the point where there was about nothing more we could do until we received our homestudy. From there, we would receive our formal approval from our adoption agency, submit our paperwork to US Customs & Immigration Services (USCIS) and then send our paperwork off to Zambia.

Then, and I’ll tell this story from my (Steve’s) perspective, came the email. Suddenly, there was a lot of news, but we weren’t even sure how to process it or what we were going to do next to think about sharing that news. We had been waiting for what seemed like forever for our homestudy and we had just received word of its completion and that it was in the mail to us when everything changed. On November 18, I was in Tennessee speaking at the Communicating Church conference. I was scheduled to speak during the main session at 11:00 and then in a breakout at 1:30. Between the two sessions, while eating lunch, I checked my email from my phone.

The message of that email? Our agency was closing their Zambia program effective immediately.

Now, to be clear, we both understand the reasons behind the decision from the agency (though we would rather not get into them here). That does not, however, make it any easier. We had expected hurdles, challenges and obstacles in the adoption process. What we had not anticipated, to be sure, was our agency closing their program! To Kim’s credit, she probably handled it better than I did. Pulling from everything that God has been teaching her this fall, she experienced a peace and faith that was a great encouragement to me. I was just in shock, and hurting (And yes, I had to get back up in front of people and speak on the use of social media in the church. Here’s guessing that, given how distracted I was, my breakout session was less than stellar).

So, there it is. It took us 8 months of searching, talking and praying to land on Zambia and with one email, it felt like the house of cards crashed around us. In short, we were left with two options.

1. Pick a different country and backtrack a little bit.
2. Proceed with Zambia without the aid and assistance of an adoption agency.

At first glance, option 2 sounded crazy. And yet, we couldn’t get past a single question. Up till now, we were convinced that our child was in Zambia. Had that suddenly changed? Our answer? No. It hadn’t. We committed in this process not to try and bust through closed doors. But this didn’t seem to us like a closed door. Instead, as we prayed and deliberated, it actually seems more like a test. How much do we love this child and what hurdles are we willing to jump to reach her?

So, here we are, less than 2 weeks from Christmas, with only one gift for which we both long: to hold our child in our arms. We have received all paperwork back from the agency and are, this week, filing with USCIS. If all goes according to plan, we’ll be traveling to Zambia this coming spring. But given this unexpected hurdle, all going according to plan may be out of the question. This I know: we will leap hurdles, dodge obstacles and push through the challenges to find our child. More on that to come.

What a relief it has been to finally share the news of the rescue mission God is leading us on. It’s been hard keeping that caged up while we took the first couple of major steps. So, now that you know we are pursuing an adoption, you may be asking, WHY? Why would we adopt a child when we can obviously have biological children of our own?

Well, first there is the biblical precedent and imperative to care for the orphan. God the Father has adopted us as orphans and made us sons and heirs despite our sinfulness. Moreover, as James 1:27 declares, “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.”

Last year, Steve wrote a couple of blog articles on orphans and adoption, connecting our spiritual adoption to the way we are called to care for orphans. Check out those posts…

• Our Adoption as Sons
• The Cry of the Orphan

Then there is our personal story of how the Lord has brought us to this journey of adoption…

Before we even got married, Steve and I talked about the possibility of bringing a child into our family by adoption.  Through most of the early years of our marriage, this was just a very far-off, obscure idea. We began to consider adoption more seriously during the heartache of waiting for Jeremiah.  Even after we were blessed with our beautiful son, we knew that adoption was definitely in our future.

In September of 2009, we were elated to find out that I was pregnant with our second child.  Just a few short weeks later, we mourned the loss of our baby, which may have been the greatest heartache either of us have ever experienced in our lives.  It was in our mourning for our baby that God made it very clear to us that we were not to wait any longer and we began the long process of researching international adoption.  Our God is sovereign and His plan has no mistakes.  While He holds our precious baby in His arms in heaven, God has created a place in our family for a hurting child without a family.