Three years later, Victor legally became a part of our family. This, also, signaled the end of my parents attempt at foster care. They realized that if anyone came to live with us they would not be able to let them go without adopting them. For some reason, my parents decided that they did not want a million kids.
Over the next few weeks I am going to be writing about adoption. I recently preached on this subject to my local church. You can listen to it here. I believe this ties into the heart of You Are More Ministries and what we are about. In the course of these writings I will be answering four questions:
What is adoption?
Why should we adopt?
Who do we adopt?
How do we adopt?
As we go along in this discussion I would appreciate it if people chimed in with their stories of adoption, specifically, what has God taught you through the process?
My wife and I have never adopted a child before, other than financial support through Holt International, but we are working in that direction. Financial stability seems to be an important thing. Nevertheless, I do feel like the Lord has been picking at my heart about the subject of adoption so now I spew it to you.
This is the part where I should launch into question one but I will tease my readership with it and give them some time to answer the questions for themselves. Until next time, may you bask in the Father's love!
HI! I also have adopted siblings- 4 out of 7 of us were adopted and my husband and I adopted 7 children. Just tonight as I bounced your scared 1 yo nephew in the swimming pool helping him get comfortable in the water I was reminded of what an amazing thing it is to help a child. The soothing, repetitive movements, his feet always landing on my legs to give him "ground." His willingness to come back and trust me, even after I'd dunked him in the water reminded me of how much children need trustworthy adults in their lives when their world is rocked by neglect and abuse. It's amazing to me how children can learn to trust again when given "ground" to stand on. It's not always easy and like our little man in the water may take several times for him to be comfortable it may take years and many, many trials for our foster/adopted children to love. But with the grace of God we give them the rythmic bouncing(the routine of the home-the food, warmth, schooling), the consistent love and the ground rules to build their love and trust. As my children happily and confidently jumped, swam and splashed in the small city pool around us I was reminded of just how far we've come and I know only God got us here from the emotional and developmental babies we started our parenting journey with.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your input Ashley. You gave me some beautiful imagery to ponder as I care for my kids.
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