Stories about Adoption - Page 2

 

About that time I read one of Joni Eareckson Tada's books. She became a quadriplegic as a result of a diving accident she had, when she was 17 years old. I came to the conclusion that all of her pain was not for nothing! God led her through that accident and all her pain, to direct her on a "path" which she would have never chosen for herself. Because of that "accident", she has touched people's lives all over the world.

My husband and I decided that we would get off the medical track and start pursuing adoption. Some of our friends which lived in Texas had adopted two boys, and were very supportive to us. The sent us a couple of books on how to do a private adoption. We decided to take an investigative trip back to the States for a couple of months, hoping that we could possibly adopt a baby during the time we were in the USA. We wrote a letter describing ourselves to give to a birth mother and sent it out to all of our prayers partners, which numbered over 200 at that time. We also talked to some adoption agencies. We soon Discovered that things might not be as simple as we thought. All the agencies told us we had to reside in a particular state in the United States for at least six months before we could be eligible to adopt.

We met with one of our pastors to talk about our situation. He acknowledged that God can always work a miracle, but more often chooses to work in a way that is less spectacular. He advised us that, because of our age, we needed to do right away whatever it took, to make adoptions a realistic possibility. He said that we did not want to wake up in our fifties, without a child and realize we could have had one 15 years ago, for the same amount that it would have cost us to purchase a car!

Shortly before our time was up and we came back to Austria, we found a list of thirty six adoption agencies that were willing to work with Americans who were living overseas. We wrote to all of them. Some of them wrote back. Most of them did not. We found only two agencies that we were interested in working with. After a couple of months back in Austria, we concluded that it was not going to work out for us to stay in Austria and adopt from there. God was leading us to go back to the States and live.

As I mentioned earlier, much of my entire ministry was working with other people's children and I just couldn't take it any longer. If I stopped all of my ministry that involved children, there wasn't much left for me to do. It was difficult for those who had not experienced infertility to understand it. We were working with a small church consisting mostly of young families with very young children. It was a very painful decision. We spent the next three months saying goodbye to all of our friends in Austria and then headed home (USA), to live in Texas.

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