Why China

I have talked a little about this in other posts but here are more details.  I always knew I wanted to adopt internationally.  However, B did not always know this!  I mentioned it to him when we first (beginning of 2007) started seriously talking about adoption and he ended that discussion quickly.  I just started praying that God would soften his heart and decided I wouldn’t bring up the international thing again.  I wanted it to be his decision for our family.  He is the head of the house and things always work better when I step down and let him make decisions.  So I waited for him to come to the same conclusion I did.  That happened on September 3^rd, 2007…the day Jonah was born.  We were flying back from visiting friends and some of their friends had adopted Chinese daughters and God used them to speak to B’s heart. 

In order to adopt from China both potential parents have to be 30 years old.  So we knew we had three years before we could adopt.  This was actually a good time line for us.  My parents had just moved to another country for three years so they would be back for support around that time.  Don’t get me wrong…waiting that long was still hard. 

When we started looking at adoption agencies, we decided to go to an intro class given by the agency we ended up using.  They just went through the basics of each country they worked with.  When they showed the pictures of all the kids I wanted every one of them and so did B.  He was fine looking into other countries (amazing since he was so closed to it before).  I still felt a tug towards China.  One thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want the wait time to be a factor in our decision.  I didn’t want us to choose another country simply because we would get a child faster.  As we prayed about it I definitely felt like we were supposed to adopt from China and choosing any other country would be disobeying God.  So we decided to wait.

We went into the China program in the fall of 2010.  We took our time filling out the paper work and taking all the necessary steps.  In January of 2011, we got a call that there was a little boy in Hong Kong.  The Hong Kong program is completely different from the China program.  We could have gone into this program when we first started talking about it and already have a child by now.  That was not God’s plan though.  If we had done that this little boy would not be ours.  He was a new born and was not in the system yet.  Craziness!  Of course we had to pray about this little boy before we absolutely said yes.  We had just been so sure that we were supposed to adopt from CHINA!  We didn’t pray long though.  The wait time was NOT an issue anymore and we felt drawn to him.

So that is how we got where we are now!  This whole time God has been giving us a heart for Chinese people…here and there!

Katie

I tried to load some other pictures from our last trip to China, but the blog site isn't working correctly.  Maybe next time.