Adoption Story: David and Kristen

Can I confess a little something here? I work with really amazing couples and sometimes, selfishly, I'm so bummed when their adoption journey goes so quickly! David and Kristen were just like this. I loved chatting with them over coffee when they were in town visiting family about their faith and how God brought them to adoption. They are a couple with crazy big hearts and beautiful dreams and I knew God would use both as he wrote the story of how they became parents. Today Kristen shares her heart and how God brought them to adoption, and how He was enough even in the scary unknowns of it all. 

David and I decided adoption was the right path for us several years after our infertility diagnosis. It took some time to reconcile and change how we thought we would grow our family. There is so much inside those two sentences, pain, fear, anger, grief and hopelessness. Even after we made the decision to adopt we knew we should wait for some practical areas of our life to settle down. I was in the midst of a pretty serious two year dental process that required an intense jaw surgery. 

As soon as I was feeling well post-surgery, we sought out Susan from Christian Adoption Consultants, knowing we wanted to move forward and that we wanted the wait to be as small as possible. We very quickly started the daunting home study process. All along the home study process and the profile process, David and I had to do so many things that were outside of our comfort zone, so many things that we would never have done if it wasn’t required: background checks, finger printing, home visits from social workers, doctor's visits and reports, pictures of ourselves, home, and lives. It was an extensive and invasive, but at each step I felt compelled to just keep moving forward, to stay in the process, no matter what I was feeling fear-wise, I just kept pressing though. As we would describe the process to friends, I would see the grimaces on their faces as we described certain parts and inside I would chuckle thinking “you don’t even know that half of it.” And sure in moments I would cry and freak out and go back to my tried and true line, “I don’t want to do this” “this is not how I saw my life turning out.” But I would press through and say to myself, “Kristen if you want this and keep going there will be a HUGE blessing at the end.”

We were finally home study approved mid-February, and after seeing a handful of situations from Susan and hearing a couple no’s, we finally heard our “yes” on March 18th, a little baby girl who had been born the 16th. We met Emma the very next day and fell instantly in love. Due to legal issues, we had to leave her and wait 30 days for all the paperwork to come through, she was in a city about 4 hours from ours and so we would visit her every weekend. On April 12th we finally got the call that we could pick her up and bring her home for good. 

And now when I look at her I am amazed at this whole process, a process I hated at times but changed my life, made me a better person, a braver person. The Lord was able to match my broken infertile body with a little girl with a broken family, and out of both my loss and Emma's loss, we have been given so much love. I'm still so in awe of this perfect love born out of such brokenness.

P.S. The time between the two pictures shown (announcing to their friends they were planning to adopt when their daughter was in their arms)? 25 days.