God placed the call to adopt in our hearts before we were even married. My brother
and his wife adopted a 5 day old baby and modeled for us the joy of adoption. After
we were married, finished college and bought a house, we decided to start a family.
The Lord blessed us with 2 biological children, a boy and a girl, and we had a comfortable
life. Always, the call to adopt was in the back of our minds.
In June of 1997 we moved our family to Wisconsin. Our two children were 7 and 8
years old and I decided that it was time to either pursue the adoption idea or to
give it up forever. After the children started school in the fall, I scheduled lunch
with my husband and told him that I had been thinking a lot about adoption and felt
it was time to either go for it or give it up. Unbeknownst to me, God had also been
speaking to him, so he turned to me and said “let’s go for it!” That was the beginning
of our 2 year process to bring home 2 beautiful children from Russia. We knew nothing
about the adoption process or where to start so we began where every educated, informed
person goes – the Yellow Pages!! I looked up Christian adoption agencies and started
making phone calls. One agency caught my attention – they were starting a new Russian
program. So, in December of 1997 we went to an orientation meeting and applied to
adopt a child from Irkutsk, Russia.
Over the next several months as we completed our home study and put together our
dossier, we discussed that we would want to eventually adopt two children and so
we made the decision to apply for two children at once, an infant and a toddler.
We talked to our son and daughter, including them in our plans from the beginning,
and generally built within them excitement about adding to our family through adoption.
Finally, a year after we had applied for the adoption we got 2 phone calls that
started an emotional roller coaster ride. The first phone call was from our agency,
telling us that the Judge in Irkutsk, Russia was suspending all adoption approvals.
The next day we received a 2nd phone call saying they had our referrals and did
we want to come see pictures of our son and daughter? This began the hardest test
of the entire process. We had now accepted the referral for a 9 month old girl,
Nina and a 18 month old boy, Urie. The situation with the judge, however, meant
we did not know if we would ever be able to go to Russia and bring them home. We
knew that if God wanted these two children to be in our family – it would happen.
So we agreed that we would continue to pursue them and if it fell through we would
take that as a closed door. The months ahead were filled with many twists and turns,
but the judge finally started approving adoptions and we waited for our court date
to be set.
The Bible tells us in Psalm 139:16 “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days
ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” This verse
has become the cornerstone of our adoption journey. We firmly believe that God does
ordain each of our days, and that He did ordain these two children to be in our
family. On September 30th, 1999 two years after the decision to “go for it” we brought
home Justin and Jessica from an orphanage in Irkutsk, Russia where they joined their
big brother and sister and we became the family that God had ordained from the beginning.
In 2007 God called us to be part of starting an orphan care ministry at North Way.
This has enabled us to continue our call to work in the area of adoption, to share
our story with others, and help others through the process. We pray that all Christians
will be convicted by the words of Psalm 82:3 to “defend the weak and the fatherless”
and to advocate for the needs of orphans all around the world.