Many of you knew this was coming, some of you might find this to be a surprise. Casey & I have pursued this passion for so long that it's hard to type these words or know the best place to start. We've met so many of you along the way that maybe we will just start this story at the very beginning-- 14 years ago when we first got married.
Early on we had dreams of possibly doing missions & working in orphanages-- we knew we shared a genuine brokenness for orphans & a heart to love them. To celebrate our 1-year anniversary, we were surprised with a pregnancy -- and started praying about adoption as a possibility in the future. Years later after we had three kids, we chose to take a break from building our biological family & look into adoption. We started saving & fundraising in 2012 & in early 2013 joined the Ethiopia program of America World Adoption Agency. As we were on the classic adoption paperwork trail, our local home study agency had recently implemented a new policy that made them have to let us go in early 2014. At this time we also had a surprise pregnancy, so it was difficult to find an agency that would pick up a family that was already expecting a child. We enlisted the help of the agency Special Children near Milwaukee, and were able to submit our completed dossier to Ethiopia that year, not long after Lincoln was born. Soon after, Ethiopian adoptions started moving terribly slow until they ground to a halt by the end of 2015. America World gave us a discount to switch to the China program, and so we embarked on putting together a new dossier in 2016- hoping to adopt a baby or toddler girl with special needs. (Ethiopia as a country has since put a ban on foreign adoptions.)
Just before we got our dossier out to China, Casey got really sick in late 2016. It took doctors until late 2017 to figure out what was going on with him – leaking cerebrospinal fluid. We renewed our USCIS form hoping that the doctors could fix Casey through surgery, and since then have been waiting for a match with a child. This month Casey had his 12-wk post-op appointment, & we got the news from Mayo that they have done all they can do for his neck leak, as it is caused by a birth defect that will put him at high risk for the rest of his life. Since Casey continues to have symptoms and needs to lay down a lot, we cannot currently move forward with a special needs adoption. We have prayed during these past 1.5 years as we wrestled through this, trying to take the necessary steps to keep our dossier updated & be ready to move forward if Casey could heal. Our agencies have been patient, but we are nearing the deadline our agency has given us on making a final decision. It is just not financially viable to keep an adoption on hold forever, since all of the necessary updates are also quite expensive.
So with tears we have laid down our six-year quest to bring a little girl into our home. So many of you have donated to our adoption that we feel the need to update you on how the finances shook out. Thankfully, we were able to raise & earn enough to cover the adoption expenses up to this point. We are not in debt, but everything that has been donated & earned has gotten us this far in our adoption.
We are trusting the Lord as we move forward into this new season and reminding ourselves that nothing is wasted that is done for Him in faith. Thank you to so many of you who have cheered us on with every step. You believed in us, you encouraged us, you helped us raise funds, you donated, you cried with us as we hit so many hurdles, & you loved on us-- you helped us keep going. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
It's funny how God works things out in ways we can't predict, and we know He will continue to show us His purpose for this chapter in our lives. One of our top girl names as we prayed over a future adopted daughter was the name Vivian - which means "alive". In God’s grace and providence, a young Chinese student named Vivian from Ripon College came to faith in Christ while attending our church and we were able to host her in our home in 2016-2017 before she went off to seminary. She is now very much part of our family. So even as God was closing one door he was opening another, and we give him thanks!
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