Alyssa had the opportunity to go on a youth mission trip with our Church youth group to Mexico city. She had a great time on her trip and the biggest impact it had on her was visiting the orphanages. She was thrilled to meet the Children there as well as saddened by what she witnessed, so many children in such poverty.
When she returned home from her trip, she mentioned to us that we should adopt one of those children from the orphanage she visited. If you would have told me that I had grown a second head, I wouldn't have been more surprised. My first reaction was "No way!" "We have lots of kids" etc....the excuses were endless. The whole topic was left alone for a while after that. A couple of months went by and it was brought up again by Alyssa, only this time she had reinforcements....Clarissa! It was talked about again for a while and my mind had not changed a bit. Again it was left for a while and then to my utmost surprise, Ron started to ask "Why not?" Why not adopt? I was starting to feel like I was being backed against a wall. I still said no way. But slowly my mind started to wonder in that direction....should we? Can we? But we have a big family already and because nothing made sense to me anymore, I started to pray....when you don't know what to do, praying has always helped and guided me on a confusing road. I prayed that God would show us whether this was what HE wanted for us. Ron and I started to talk about it some more, we discussed how this would change our family forever, were we ready for that, would the kids be ok with that? We talked with the girls about it, then changes this would bring to them in their everyday life, this was a decision we had to make as a family and we needed to make sure we knew that this was for life. We prayed some more :)
God is good! I now believe Madison came into our life for this very reason, I believe Alyssa went on her mission trip to Mexico City for this very reason. When I look back now, I can see how God prepared us for years for this event. He had to work at softening my heart up to the idea but now that he has, I am sooo excited.
Once we had decided to proceed with the adoption, we asked the girls if they wanted a brother or sister and they all decided on a brother, we left that decision to them. Our next step was to find a adoption agency we could go through to find out if we could adopt from Mexico City. Through surfing the world wide web, I found CAFAC. We contacted them only to find out Mexico City is closed to international adoption. Now what? Was that God closing a door? But he opened a window instead. We started to search through Country's that were open for adoption and Ethiopia kept coming back to us. It was a sad search. Those people in Ethipia love their Children, it was unbelievable reading some of the story's. Most of the middle aged people were dying by the millions because of Aids. Siblings are taking care of each other if there are no Grandparents around to help and most times the Grandparents don't have sufficient funds to take care of Children so they get dropped off at Orphanages. Siblings who are taking care of each other are usually under 15 years of age and most of them end up in Orphanages as well. One story I read was of a young mother who knocked on the door of an Orphanage and when the doors opened up, she handed the baby to the worker and fell to the ground and died. Her love for her Child kept her alive long enough to make sure someone would look after the baby. I know this story to be true because it happened at the Orphanage that we will be adopting from through CAFAC. We are excited, anxious and waiting to see our Son and consider it an honor that God would lead us down this road.
