A couple years ago I birthed this project called Better Stories. It was built on the idea that we were never meant to live life complacent. It contained a series of live talks, podcast interviews, and more. Over the course of that time, my wife Carrie and I began to chase a dream of adoption.
It has been a long while since we have had any updates regarding our family’s adoption story. To say the least, it has been a long and grueling process. Nearly two years to this point since we started the pursuit of adopting a child from Burundi, Africa.
With that said, I want to tell you the story of where things are at this point. We shared this yesterday with our church family for Orphan Sunday, so I thought it was time to “go public.”
When Carrie and I began to wrestle with what we understood to be a call to adoption, we weren’t sure exactly what that meant. We talked about international adoption. We also talked about sensing that God wanted our house to stay open, perhaps to a college student needing a family and a home. In many ways both of those things happened.
As we said yes to pursuing international adoption, we also met a young woman named Stephanie (pictured above to my right) who had begun attending our church and was a student at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Getting to know Stephanie has been a gift to our entire family. She spent the summer of 2018 with us and became like a daughter to Carrie and I and a sister to our girls. In February of this year, as she wrestled with her own family background and faced some big decisions, we let her know that if it made sense we would be happy to assume guardianship or pursue adoption of her. We didn’t know what that meant for an almost 21-year old woman, but we knew she was family and we wanted to make that as real as possible. All of this was taking place as we continued our international adoption process.
Several months later, in July of this year, Stephanie asked us if we would still be willing to adopt her, because she wanted to be a part of our family. We were amazed at God’s goodness and so excited to say yes and gain this daughter.
And that leads to the past month.
It turns out, adopting a 21-year old domestically is much easier than adopting a young girl internationally. After a few signed papers, we had a court date to bring our new (21-year old) daughter “home”. When this was set, I called our international agency and the lady told me this was amazing and would only put our Burundi process “on hold”. We would not lose our international place in line; Stephanie would merely need to do some paperwork and we could update our immigration forms and all would be ready to move forward. A slight delay, but we were moving.
Then, a week later, I received a call from our same international agent apologizing profusely. She informed me that after talking with several of their social workers their policy was that if we, as a family, had adopted someone else (even a 21-year old), that our international process was to be terminated. If we would like to continue this international adoption we would be taken back to square one and start over in this (nearly 2-year) process.
We found all this out the beginning of this month.
To say the least, this has been a bit of a shellshock. We are standing in between what the author Kelly Nikondeha calls “the two rivers” of relinquishment and reception. We have been given, by God, the gift of an amazing new 21-year old daughter named Stephanie. She is a piece we didn’t know was missing - full of joy and passion and life. She is truly our daughter.
We have also watched a process and pursuit of international adoption end. Given this same scenario 100 more times, we would not change a thing. We would say “yes” to sweet Stephanie every single time. She is our daughter. She is our gift. And… we are sad to see a process end that connected us to Burundi. We feel some guilt for not knowing this; though, apparently there was no way of knowing. But we are overjoyed at the completion of our family.
I share all this because you are our tribe. You are the ones who have walked beside us in this. You are the ones who text, call, check-in and let us know you’re praying. You have been with us in this journey, and we wanted to tell this story.
Our anthem in this season has been the words of that old song, “You give and take away… but my heart will choose to say… Blessed be Your name.” And we are living that… experiencing God’s gift even as we surrender and lay down a part of a dream. We do not feel like we’ve lost… only that we’ve gained this precious daughter. We had the privilege of hearing God call, like Abraham, to follow Him even when we didn’t know the outcome. And while the outcome isn’t what we expected, it is His outcome, and we are at peace with that.
So, thank you. Thank you for loving us. For dreaming with us. For celebrating with us and for grieving with us. Our family is amazing; and our family is tired. Those are tensions we recognize and embrace. Following Jesus is hard; but we wouldn’t trade it for anything. And along the way, we have found courage in your presence in our lives. For that, we are grateful.