We know that the cost of adoption is high - spiritually, emotionally, and financially - and we are so grateful for our community's generosity in "holding the rope" for our family. We have been awarded a $5000 matching grant administered by Lifesong for Orphans, as well as an $8500 direct grant from Mercy Hill Church. Please read our story below and consider supporting our family in this season. More than anything, we covet your prayers as we step into international adoption!
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“You can pray about getting involved in foster care and adoption, but God isn’t going to tell you no. He’s already called us all to it in some way - fostering, adopting, or holding the rope for others.” Those words I heard from an adoptive family in our church in 2019 stuck in my heart for months before we did anything about it. We’re not equipped to foster…we’ve never raised kids of our own…we’re still “new” here… All of these were reasons why I never thought foster care or adoption would be part of our story in the way that it is now. BUT GOD...
When we moved to North Carolina in the summer of 2018, we immediately started searching for a church that we could call home. We came to love Mercy Hill pretty quickly, and we really felt like the Lord had brought us here for a reason – but it was a reason we didn’t fully understand until we attended a foster and adoption interest meeting in May 2019. We had heard for months about Mercy Hill’s heart for foster care and adoption, but we didn’t know how or even if we would get involved. We started to pray about how the Lord could use us, but we just weren’t on the same page about the timing or our capacity for helping in this way. When we found out about the Foster Care and Adoption Ministry interest meeting and decided to go, we just expected that we would get some information on ways to get involved and then keep praying about it. We heard stories from foster families in our church, private agency workers, and community ministries that support foster and adoptive families. We listened to a panel of families who had been through this process, who answered so many of the questions that we had about what foster care really looked like. But what was completely mind-boggling to us were the numbers – the staggering number of children that enter into foster care every year, and the tiny number of foster homes in our county. We both remember looking over at each other in the middle of frantically taking notes and whispering, “We HAVE to do this.” Before the meeting could even wrap up, we signed up for the foster care training classes that were being offered at Mercy Hill. It became so clear to us in that moment that THIS was why we were brought to Mercy Hill – because He wanted us in a community of believers passionate about foster care and adoption.
Over the 5+ years that we were foster parents, which eventually led to becoming adoptive parents of our amazing twin girls, we became even more deeply aware of adoption as a picture of the Gospel - that we “who were once far off have now been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). We added to our family both biologically and through foster care adoption, and as we closed the door on both of those chapters, we felt the Lord pulling our hearts toward the need for international adoption. Our desire to build our family not only out of biology, but even more so out of our theology, has really driven our motivation for caring for the most vulnerable through adoption. We have seen God’s faithfulness in walking us through some of the most challenging days as we parent children who have come from hard places, and we trust that He will continue to be faithful as we put our “yes” on the table in adopting a child from India. If you would have asked us 8 years ago if we ever imagined our family looking the way that it does now, we would have never believed it. BUT GOD - “who is able to do immeasurably more than all that we could ask or imagine…to Him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever!” (Ephesians 3:20)