Mom’s Story:
Story begins…I was on a short-term missions trip to Mexico in my last year of college. During this time, I visited a orphanage and was deeply affected by this experience. I held a little baby girl in my arms who was the same exact age as my then fiancee’s niece. This niece happened to be the very 1st grandchild on both sides of the family and was showered with love from tons of people. Holding this little orphan girl who had absolutely no one to love her like family broke my heart. For awhile, I felt angry and frustrated at God…”why God? How come this little girl has no one to love her and my fiancee’s niece has so many people who love her? It’s not fair!” But then God spoke in His still small voice, “Will you love her?” At that moment, I was deeply convicted to have adoption be a part of my life and ministry.
I came home from the missions trip and shared with my then fiancee, Dad, about this experience and conviction. At that time Dad had not thought about adoption at all. He thought I was just experiencing an emotional high from the missions trip and humored me. =)
But through time, I started reading tons of books on adoption and would share everything with Dad. Slowly God started to open Dad’s heart towards adoption. Initially we were leaning towards adopting from China…and was therefore waiting for Mom to hit the 30 year old milestone so we could apply.
Life went on…adoption was always on the back of our minds. 3 years into our marriage, God blessed us with a beautiful little girl by birth, Big Sister. Holding Big Sister in our arms after she was born even more convicted us about our desire to adopt. To think that there are precious babies out there who had no one to love and hold them…
God led us to a big move to another area of the state and a new church. We kept sharing about our desire to adopt and praying and learning about adoption as we waited for Mom to turn 30 years old. 2 years after Big Sister was born, God blessed us with our 2nd child by birth, our bundle of energy, Little Brother. After we had Little Brother, we asked God, should we still adopt?
There were a lot of fears and worries that started to pop in our minds. Again through prayer and encouragement from others, we felt that if the only thing that was holding us back from moving forward with adoption was fear, then we had to let that go, turn to God…for “perfect love casts out all fear.” We are thankful for that time of worrying and questioning because it made us address a lot of those “what if” issues so that we can move forward into this adoption process with our eyes wide open…knowing that it may not be all rosy and happy…but as long as we are in accordance to His will…we are in the most happy and best place of all.
After Mom turned 30, we started the paperwork for our dossier. However, as we began the paperwork and China’s program slowed down, we realized that the wait for China could be over 5-6 years. This led us to reconsider and we felt that God was leading us towards Korea. This is our nation of heritage though both of us are Korean-Americans. We felt that God gave us the Korean language and culture and by adopting a Korean child we could easily pass that onto him/her.
Dad’s Story:
This was a very selfish way to view adoption. If I view it merely from my perspective, God was showing me that I would lose out on what God’s perspective is on adoption. Ultimately God chose me to be His child for His purposes so that I might be like Him, that I might reflect the image of God. He tells us to be imitators of God as His beloved children (Eph 5:1). I’m not sure if I fully understand what that means, but at the very least, I believe that He has called us to strive to know His heart and delight in wanting to be like Him.
The Bible tells us that God has a heart to take a lost humanity and bring them into a right relationship with Him. It tells a story of God’s pursuit after lost sinners in need of redemption. In essence, the heart of the gospel is that He would take those that deserve the wrath of God and choose to save us. Not only that, He also takes us into His family and gives us the privileges of sonship, so that we might cry out “Abba, Father.”
I believe this is the heart of God…now, the question I am forced to ask is, “How can I be like my Father?” In other words, how do I reflect a heart that desires to bring in those that are outside of His family and have them experience the privilege of being in the family of God? The conclusion was that the question should not be, “Should we consider adoption?” but rather it became, “How could we not consider adoption?” Ultimately, we pray that through adoption, God’s heart would be reflected as we strive to grow our family in His likeness.
