Adoption Update - National Adoption Month

"learn to do good;

seek justice,

correct oppression;

bring justice to the fatherless,

plead the widow's cause."

-Isaiah 1:17

"For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs--heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him."

-Romans 8:15-17

    So it's National Adoption Month, which means I have been inundated with gentle reminders of how long overdue I am in providing an update on our adoption. I would blame it on 2020, but then I'm not sure who/what to blame for 2018 and 2019. Last time I checked in, we were still awaiting the birth of our firstborn, and he didn't even have a name yet! And now Gideon is almost three, and we even have another addition to the family. Our beautiful daughter Miria is three months old this week. These two are wonderful, and Caitlin and I are so blessed by them. The lack of sleep this last three months has been really sanctifying too! It's made much of 2020 seem like a dream, which has been a blessing in and of itself.

    I should probably start a dedicated blog to chronicle Gideon's misadventures, but that's a task for another day. Many of those are preserved in the nightly lore of Mr. Quackers and Little Al anyway. But as Gideon has been consistently learning these days, not everything is about him. So let's get on with the adoption update.

    When I last left you back in 2017, we hadn't gotten much news from the Bulgarian MOJ (Ministry of Justice) on our place on their adoption referral list. In April 2018, we got our first update that we were #716 on the list, which meant it would likely be another 2 years before we received a referral. This was disappointing news because we had already been on the list for 2 years, but it was encouraging to receive an update. We also had a newborn, so we were excited to have some time to welcome him into our family. Our agency does have a pregnancy policy to ensure that children do not arrive into the family within a year of each other, so we knew we wouldn't be able to complete an adoption until 2019 at the earliest. 

    We also made a couple other changes to our paperwork during our home study update in 2018. The first involved changing the age range of our adopted child to be younger than Gideon. This was something that our social worker strongly recommended to preserve the birth order in our family since it can be extremely confusing for a firstborn child to have an older child placed in their home. The second change was partly inadvertent due to some conflicts in our paperwork, but our referral preferences were changed from two children to one child. After some further discussion with our social worker, we decided to leave it this way since bringing two children home becomes a lot more complicated with one child already in the home. At the same time, this change did not preclude us from being matched with two children, and we were starting to understand that God's plans for our adoption journey were slightly different than our own, so we decided to embrace the next detour(s) He might have planned for us.

    About a year after our first MOJ referral list update, we learned that we had moved up to #438 as of January 2019. We were excited to see movement, and hopeful that we might even receive a referral in 2020. And then on New Year's Eve, we found out that Caitlin was pregnant with Miracle Child #2. Of course we were super excited, and I was a little more mentally prepared for this news than the first time around! Looking back on it now, we probably thought that was the craziest thing that would happen in 2020. Caitlin and I were pretty convinced that we weren't getting a referral anytime soon anyway, so we decided to wait a couple months before we notified our agency of the pregnancy. But what would 2020 be without some drama in every facet of life?

    The first week of March 2020, Caitlin got an unexpected call from our adoption agency. We had received a referral! The MOJ in Bulgaria had matched us with a 22 month old boy, which was only a few months younger than Gideon. However, Caitlin then notified the agency that she was three months pregnant, and the aforementioned pregnancy policy came into play. This policy is in place to ensure that the family is given the time necessary to attach to each child, especially since any adopted child will have significant mental, physical, and emotional needs that call for close attention and care as bonding and attachment begin. As a result, we were required to put our adoption on hold for several months, which meant that we had to officially turn down the referral. Talk about a whirlwind of emotion! It's a strange thing to reflect upon, knowing that boy could have been our son if a few circumstances had been different. I can't help but wonder where he was placed instead, but I pray that he found a loving forever family. It's also easy to see God's providence throughout the circumstances. Based on everything that has occurred with COVID-19 since March, it's unlikely that we would have been to travel to Bulgaria this year at all, which probably would have been more discouraging than putting the adoption on hold temporarily.

    So where does that leave us now? Our adoption is still on hold for a few more months, but we were told that we wouldn't lose our place on the referral list, so there's a chance that we could receive another referral as soon as next year. But I haven't had a whole lot of luck with my predictions so far, so it's probably more likely there will be another abrupt right turn on our journey.

    So have we reconsidered adopting now that we have two children at home and after everything we've been through? Honestly, we haven't seriously considered walking away. We believe that we have been called to adopt, and by God's grace, this journey of growing our family has only served to confirm that calling. What do I mean by that? Well, if we had had two biological children on our own timeline, we wouldn't have started the adoption process as soon as we did, and it's very possible that we would have been too comfortable with our family and our life to ever seriously pursue adoption. 

    But as Christians, we aren't called to a comfortable or an easy life, we are called to deny ourselves and follow Christ (Matt. 16:24-26). Following Him looks like following His example. Christ laid aside his crown to suffer and die as a man in order to redeem his people from slavery under the law, to make us heirs of the Father (Gal. 4:1-7). Our heirship is not based on anything we've done, it's a free gift of grace that we receive because of Christ, and we have been raised up with Him (Eph. 2:4-9). That's the gospel in a nutshell.

    We had a guest pastor, Todd Froman, speak about adoption at our church this last Sunday. He said that adoption is a tangible way to show what God does through the gospel. He's right, and that's a big part of the reason that we decided to adopt in the first place. We know that adoption will not be easy, and that it will probably come with steep physical, mental, and emotional costs. We know there will be people who won't understand why we've chosen this journey, and we may even lose friends over it. But as Todd said on Sunday, the call to adoption is a call to follow the Shepherd. So when we're in the thick of it, be sure to remind us of that!

    We also know there will be great joy that will come from adoption. A fatherless child will finally be united with a father and a mother and a brother and a sister that loves them, and that will be a joyful moment! There will be some battles, but there will be victories and there will be beauty as bonding takes place. We are looking forward to the adventures as we introduce another child to the wonders of Colorado.

    So you may be wondering how you can support us. For those of you who have been supporting us via prayer or monetary gifts, know that we are deeply grateful for you! We have been blessed to be able to raise the funds we need for the adoption, so we don't need any money. But we will gladly take your prayers. There's a good chance that our child (Miracle Child #3, aka MC3) is already alive, either inside or outside the womb, so please pray for his/her health and wellbeing. Pray that MC3 will experience love and care, and that his/her heart will be prepared to join and bond with our family as their own. Pray for Gideon and Miria that they will welcome their new sibling with open arms. Pray for Caitlin and myself that our hearts and minds would be prepared to love and nurture MC3, and that we would accept whatever God has planned for us next with grace and thanksgiving. 

    And lastly, pray about how God has called you to bring justice to the fatherless, correct oppression, and plead the widow's cause (Isaiah 1:7)! Not everyone is called to adopt, but there are many other practical and meaningful ways that you can support and love those who cannot advocate for themselves. God advocates for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed, and He calls us to do the same (Matt. 25:31-40).

A Divine Detour

Trust in the Lord with all your heart

and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3:5-6

The heart of man plans his way,

but the Lord establishes his steps.

-Proverbs 16:9

Just so everyone knows, my definition of "regular updates" is at least one every year and a half. Now that we've established my blogging goals, I'll get right down to it.

Last time I checked in, Caitlin and I had just learned that we were officially on the waiting list to adopt two children from Bulgaria. Since I'm that nerdy guy that likes to have all of the intel, I had done some small amount of research into the Bulgarian adoption time frame. Although the available data points were few and far between, I felt pretty good about our chances of being matched within 12-15 months. So once we started closing in on a year on the waiting list, I was starting to get a little anxious that we hadn't heard anything and that my expectations weren't being met. Little did I know that we were about to get thrown a curve ball.

At the end of April, Caitlin and I had a long weekend trip planned to San Francisco. Caitlin had a conference at Mile High (lucky!) that Thursday and had happy hour plans afterward, so I was expecting to have the Xbox, I mean, the house to myself for a couple hours when I got home. I was pleasantly surprised to see my wife bounding up the stairs when I walked in. I joked later that she's never quite that excited to see me, so I should have known something was up. After exchanging some normal TGIF small talk, she told me she had some news for me. Then she broke the news that I was going to be a father! But I didn't register the exclamation mark. As I recall, my initial response was "You're kidding, right?". I knew that I hadn't heard anything from the adoption agency during the day, and I was pretty certain I would have at least gotten a phone call. After 5 years of trying to get pregnant and a considerable amount of fertility testing, I had accepted the premise that we would bring our first children home from somewhere other than the hospital. So it took me a few seconds to process what she was saying. Even once I confirmed that she was not actually pulling the meanest prank ever, I still felt conflicted. While I was excited that we were indeed going to have a biological child, I couldn't help but think about the 2 years we had already invested in the adoption process. We had been told that we would have to put the adoption on hold if Caitlin became pregnant and that our international application could potentially be suspended indefinitely if we had another child. This was an incredible turn of events, but it wasn't part of the plan, specifically my plan!

Fortunately, we had a 3 day weekend to process our feelings before we had to call the adoption agency. Caitlin called them the following Tuesday with the update. At this point, I had semi-prepared myself for them to say our application would be put on hold. But again, our gracious, eternal Father showed he had other plans for our growing family. Our agency congratulated us and then told us that the queue in Bulgaria was moving slowly, so we were still probably a year or two away from being matched. As a result, they said we could continue on with the adoption and just update our annual paperwork in January! Talk about a whiplash of emotions! We were so relieved by another unexpected development, although it was (and is) a little intimidating to imagine being gifted three kids within the next year or so.

After such a long period of waiting, it was almost surreal how the timing worked out. Looking back now, it's easy for me to see God's hand in everything that led up to the point where we found out we were officially going to be parents. About a year ago, Caitlin and I had struggled with questions about how we could grow our relationships within the local community so that our adopted children would have a stable environment when we brought them home. After several months of much prayer and deliberation, this led us to start visiting local churches in Aurora, even though that meant we would have less time to spend with our dear church community in Parker that we have come to know and love since 2011. This was easily one of the hardest decisions we have ever had to make as a couple, and it led to several draining months at the beginning of this year, as we visited many different churches and questioned the wisdom of what we were doing.

Eventually we decided to visit The Crossing again. This was the first church we had visited on our grand tour since it meets five minutes from our house at Smoky Hill High School. The first time we had visited, there was a swim meet at the high school, and the head pastor was sick, so we watched a John Piper sermon instead, which was a positive theology sign. Apparently it was a bit of an abnormal Sunday even for them. However, we had been welcomed graciously, and the worship was incredible and gospel-centered, so we decided to give them another shot. Our second visit was a little more in line with expectations, and we were encouraged to hear a convicting, gospel-based message, although we still hadn't heard a sermon from the head pastor, Isaac. However, we met him after the service, and he talked us into coming back the following week for Easter, where he guaranteed that he would be speaking. We were also really excited about how involved the church is within the local community. So we came back the next week, and we heard a wonderful, albeit atypical Easter message about how the resurrection shows us that we can believe the Bible is true. During the sermon, Caitlin leaned over and told me "This is where I want to go" and I readily agreed. In the weeks that followed, I was amazed at how quickly we were able to build relationships with our new church family, and each Sunday was an echoing confirmation that we had found our church home. What we didn't know that Easter was that we already had another big change coming. Less than two weeks later, we learned that we were officially going to be parents! The timing could not have been better.

Caitlin told me afterward that she had been praying for months that we would know who our future children would be by Christmas of this year. While she didn't get quite the answer that she was expecting, I don't think it's a coincidence that our baby's due date is December 25th. Praise the Lord!

Fast forward a few months to today. We have found out that we are having a boy, and he's right on schedule. We are so excited to meet our son! We have been overwhelmed by the joy and love he has already been shown, and we can't wait to introduce him to y'all. That's right, I almost got through this whole post without one "y'all", but that would have been an egregious Southern faux pas. We have not heard anything else about our adoption yet, but at this point we'd have to wait until next year to fly to Bulgaria, so it's probably better if we don't get matched until next year. It's going to be really exciting when we get that call though! With that, I am going to sign off. Grace and peace to you, brothers and sisters!

Our Bulgarian Adoption!

A photo op in Sofia, Bulgaria

For those who don't already know, Caitlin and I are excited to share that we have been in the middle of an adoption process since we returned from Germany last May. In reality, we started the paperwork process the previous fall, but when we were given the opportunity to move to Munich for a few months last spring, we decided to wait on completing our home study until we returned to the States. At that point, we had basically decided that we wanted to adopt from Bulgaria after speaking to our friend Katherine Long, who lives and works in Sofia as a missionary for MTW. Therefore, we were extremely blessed that being in Europe made it possible for us to visit Katherine last April. Katherine was a wonderful host and guide; she gave us the grand tour of Sofia, which is a beautiful city, along with a lot of background on the history and culture of Bulgaria. 

Our visit to Sofia served as confirmation that this is where we wanted to adopt, so we were excited to renew the adoption process last June once we returned to Colorado. The next big steps for us were to complete our home study and adoption training. Going into the adoption training, we were still trying to decide if we wanted to adopt one child or two. We had been leaning towards siblings, but it wasn't until we went through the training that we really began to think about our adoption from our future children's perspective. We went through an exercise where we examined loss by taking a list of ten things that were important to us (family, personal beliefs, friends, favorite places, culture, language, etc.) and then had to gradually choose which ones we could live without until there were only one or two left. Then our instructor pointed out that adopted children often lose most everything that is familiar and important to them when they are adopted. She cautioned us not to lose sight of this even though we may think we are bringing them into a better situation than where they were. As a result, we realized if we were able to adopt siblings or two children that knew each other well, our children would still be able to retain a biological connection/friend, a familiar language, and some of their culture to help them face the unknown. This was enough to convince us that we wanted to adopt two children, so we requested to be matched with siblings. We are a little nervous, but we are extremely excited about bringing home both of our children if that is how God provides.

We finished our home study and training last August, and then we had to put together our dossier for Bulgaria. This consisted of our home study, medical and financial records, background checks, family photos, and other documents. It took several months to get all of these documents compiled and certified by the state of Colorado and the Secretary of State, but we were finally able to submit the dossier to Bulgaria around the beginning of January. For the last few months, we have been waiting for the Bulgarian government to process our dossier, and we just found out a little over a week ago that it has been processed and we are officially on the waiting list for a referral! There is not a concrete timetable for how long it will take to get a referral, but the best estimate we have been able to determine is 12-24 months. Since we are open to siblings up to 6 years old, we are hoping and praying that the wait will be 12 months or less. This means that there is a good chance that our children are probably out there right now, so please join us in praying for their safety and well-being in the interim!

Once we are matched, we will travel to Bulgaria twice in the following months. The first trip will be within a couple weeks of our referral to meet and bond with our children. Then a few months later, we will return to finalize the court process and bring our children home, so there is still a lot of waiting to be done. In the meantime, we will be preparing our home and our hearts to welcome our  

children home. We plan on posting regular updates here as the adoption moves forward, so stay tuned to hear more about how God works to bring our family together!

Freedom From The Second Temptation

    "When our ultimate goal becomes security and protection, God becomes a means to that security and protection. We "test" him then, to see if he is able to serve as a means to our real god, our sense that everything will be all right. As long as we see our way toward physical, emotional, financial, relational, or familial well-being, God is welcome. But when such things are threatened, we indict God with our grumbling, even when we carefully disguise this as "venting" against our circumstances, not against God. We assume that God's love entails God's visible protection right now. When that is absent, we grow distant and prayerless toward God. We put him to the test.
      I heard not long ago from a man I haven't seen since high school. When asked about his religious beliefs, he simply says he is "an atheist until proven otherwise." I fear sometimes that despite all my Sunday learning I'm the same thing. It's not just that I want to be protected from whatever scares me-- I want to be reassured now that this protection will always be there. I want Christ, but I too often want him as a quantifiable spiritual asset, as something I can always check to be sure of just as I can check my bank account balance or my cholesterol level. I want what God has promised, but I want power of attorney to execute those promises when I determine I need them. That's not what the gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.
      What ultimately undoes the pull to self-protection is the cross. Jesus refused to seek the proof of his own protection because he was seeking more than his own protection. He was looking for you, and you weren't on the pinnacle of the temple. You were outside the camp, cut off from the presence of God. Jesus didn't throw himself from the high place for the same reason that a faithful husband doesn't run out of a burning building to call a lawyer to sue the arsonist if he knows his wife is trapped inside. Jesus didn't come to protect himself. He came for the world. He came for the church. He came for you. He bore your reproach, strapped on your curse, carried your exile. This other-directedness freed Jesus to live out a very different life from the cringing, anxiety-filled lives so many of us carry on."

    "We don't need to protect our lives because our lives are already crucified. We are, the gospel tells us, "hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). We can know then, whatever comes at us, "When Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with him in glory" (Col 3:4). We can be willing then to lose our lives, our reputations, and our arguments because we can't hold on to anything by our cunning strategies anyway. In the long run we're all dead, and in the longer run we're all raised from the dead. There's a freedom that comes from seeing that."

-Excerpts from Tempted and Tried by Russell D. Moore

Foolish Power

"For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."
- 1 Corinthians 1:18