Go Time

Summer's end neared and we still hadn't done anything to move an adoption forward. Tim and I both felt that it was time to act. After finding Edmond and Edina's faces on Rainbowkids.com, I contacted their listing agency. The reply seemed an end to that option as they indicated that families with a completed home study was the starting point with that sibling group. That was not us.

However, I knew that God had a plan for those orphans and he had a plan for us. We decided to call a local Christian agency that offered social services including home studies. Gateway Woods was an organization that I had grown up knowing well. I had distant relatives that had moved the forty miles north to Gateway Woods when I was an adolescent and I remembered that they had moved there to be "houseparents" to troubled foster kids. Every year, we would attend the fundraising auction that our church denomination held to aid and grow the campus of Gateway Woods.

Tim and I made the short drive to Leo, Indiana, finding a much larger campus than I had remembered as a young adult. We met with the adoption coordinator  there (she happened to be a dear friend of my mother's from when they lived in Bluffton) who flooded us with information on adoption and the services they provide.

One pleasantly surprising detail we discovered was the opportunity to adopt from a handful of countries. We know from Loving Shepherd Ministries that Ethiopia was a viable option, but Gateway plays a major roll in many international adoptions and she gave us recent, real stories of families just like ours also adopting from the Congo and Niger. She added that because each orphan is different, sometimes countries will overlook laws in order to place orphans, especially if they are older. Because we wanted to adopt an older child (or children), she thought we would also be eligible to adopt from other countries.

This seemed freeing to us! Other families had recently applied, been matched, and brought kids home just like we intended! For the first time, we looked at each other with expressions that said, "We are really doing this!"

At the end of our consultation (at no charge!), she asked if we were ready to move forward to which we responded together, "Yes!"

She advised us to begin with our home study and passed a stack of paperwork across her desk to us. The packet would guide us through the document collection we would be doing for the next few weeks. She set another appointment up for us and said, "At that appointment, we will need to know from which country you are interested in adopting."

We immediately replied, "Well, you tell us...we have no clue and really just want whatever God makes available to us." We reassured her that we were fairly flexible and wanted her expert advice in choosing a location from which to adopt. This seemed too big a decision to arbitrarily make.

She then asked, "Well, do you have any leads? Have you seen any photos of waiting kids?"

Tim looked at me and his face said to me, "Ummmm, do those twins count?"

Of course, I immediately chimed in, "Well, I did see an adorable photo of twins! I don't know much about them, I only know the agency wanted a family with a completed home study."

A smile spread across her face as she said, "Twins! Well, they would fit right into your family! Won't your parents be tickled...another set of twins for the Smith family!" She laughed and encouraged me to contact them again to see if they were still available for adoption  After asking several questions about the agency, she assured us that it seemed like a legitimate option. She also gave us names of other agencies from the countries she had mentioned that also have photo listings of older children and sibling sets in case the twins were not an option anymore.

Oh my....we had a plan! WE WERE DOING THIS!

We felt for the first time that we had someone willing to work for us, advocate for us, pray for us and with us, and guide us in this foreign process. We also felt a bit more overwhelmed as the details began revealing themselves. Adoption is a costly and rigorous process. Yes, we had a lot to talk about on the way home from Leo that night...a conversation that continued for the next several days.