Our Adoption Adventure begins

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We’re honestly nervous about being adoptive parents, but at the same time excited! Here’s a snapshot of our process of coming to this point. In the summer of 2008, our interest in adoption began to grow. We had tried for nearly a year and a half to get pregnant with no success and the seed was planted for us to consider adoption. We began to pray about it and think about adoption more seriously over the summer.

As we were surfing the internet researching adoption, we found an agency out of Oregon called All God’s Children. The video from their website, called ‘Come Near and Rescue Me’ definitely pulled at our heart strings in our decision making process: http://www.allgodschildren.org/about/videos/

We’ve come to conclude this process to be very congruent with the gospel message itself. Adoption is taking a child without a family and bringing them into a family where they can be deeply loved, accepted, and protected. The adoption process has come to be for us a very vivid expression of living out the gospel. In our current life circumstances, this is where following Christ has taken us.


We have signed on with an Ethiopia adoption program through All God’s Children. We have requested a boy or a girl, two years and younger. Ethiopia currently is one of the most open countries to international adoption. It is estimated that there are 4 million orphans in the country, largely from civil war, poverty, and the AIDS epidemic. That number approaches the combined population of Kansas and Nebraska. I cannot wrap my mind around that fact.

Aaron and Audrey have expressed excitement to the idea of adding another sibling to our home. Audrey especially likes the idea of having a baby around to play with. Audrey even has a few baby dolls and animals she excitedly calls ‘adopted’. She will frequently turn to us when talking about a doll or animal and proclaim “this one is adopted.”

We’ll keep you posted as we progress through the process. For now, we are wading through what one friend has called the ‘paperwork pregnancy’ of adoption. We hope to have our dossier paperwork completed soon and then enter the waiting for referral phase.