Three Times A Mom

We chose to adopt because....

The following are exerpts from a statement we wrote when applying to our adoption agency over a year ago. It addresses many of the questions people have about why we're adopting, so I thought I'd share it with you.

We want to adopt because we believe a foreign-born child would enrich our family, we believe it is our God-given responsibility to help the poor and fatherless, and we believe it would present the world around us with an object lesson of the gospel – of God’s adoption of us as His children. God has blessed us with two beautiful biological children, and we are so grateful for the opportunity to have experienced two wonderful pregnancies, births, and first few months with an infant. However, we feel like we could be equally blessed by welcoming a little person who is already in this world and needs a family. We actually undertook permanent means of birth control so that our home could be open to someone from the other side of the world. Our hope is that this somewhat unusual step will provide opportunities for us to share the gospel not only with our new baby (who might otherwise have never heard the Truth), but also with the world around us who will certainly ask about our motivation for building our family in this way.

We are also excited about the possibility of our family becoming multicultural! We hope that it will be a constant reminder to us, and those around us, that the world is bigger than our hometown. It is especially important to us that our current children gain a vision for what God is doing around the world.

The presence of an adoptive child will certainly change our family dynamic – but then so would the addition of a third biological child. We hope that this little one will enlarge our world-view, as well as simply bring the joy to our home that any child can. Our extended family accepted the news that we were considering adoption just as excitedly as they did we we’ve announced a pregnancy. We believe that they too will love this new baby as if it were their flesh and blood.

Because our community is very multi-cultural, we believe that our family won’t face quite the challenges that an adoptive family might face in a more homogeneous environment. There are many families in our area who have adopted a foreign child, and those we’ve spoken with have not reported any negative feedback from the community.

We will attempt to handle any racially prejudiced remarks with grace and humility, turning the other cheek. Though we recognize that challenges will come, we hope that they will just give us greater opportunity to show the world that we are different, and explain to them that we can love a child of any color because Christ first loved us.

Our child will likely have questions about why she is different and why she was abandoned by her birth parents, as any adoptive child might. However, we believe that all of those difficulties can be overcome by teaching her to see herself from God’s perspective and by loving her with an unconditional love. We would be willing to help her contact her biological parents if she so desired and if it were possible, but would assure her that she is ours because we choose her and because God choose her for us.