Family Friday: Mike and Karla

Meet Mike and Karla:

Please enjoy this guest post from Karla.  They have quite the story:

Our journey to adoption began long before my husband and I even knew each other.  I remember vividly watching the Sunday night 20/20 expose on the orphanages in Romania and thinking, “I want to do something, I want to adopt one of those kids!”  And I set my mind then that someday, some way I would adopt a child who needed a family.  When Mike and I met, we discovered that both of us had a heart for adoption and knew that someday, someway our family would grow through adoption.

With the seed planted deep in our hearts, we began the journey of our married life.  Being the “wise and smart” young Christians that we were, we planned to have three biological children and then adopt a baby girl from China.  We had it all mapped out. 

Our first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.  We were heartbroken but not deterred and not long after our doctor cleared us to try again we were pregnant a second time.  Our daughter Bethany was born in 1999.  My water broke at 23 weeks and I was on hospital bed rest for seven weeks.  Bethany was born at 30 weeks gestation and spent five weeks in the NICU.   In 2002 we suffered another miscarriage.  And in 2004 welcomed our first son, Josiah.  What a joy it was to have a healthy complication free pregnancy!  Two years later we were thrilled to be expecting another son.  At 35 weeks gestation I developed pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome and our 3^rd child, Judah was born prematurely.  Thankfully, Judah was healthy and did not have to go into the NICU.

We had walked an interesting, and not so easy, road to our biological children.  God is indeed faithful and we praise Him and thank Him for the children He has granted us.  Our journey of five pregnancies and only one full term healthy baby made it even clearer to us that God would use adoption to grow our family.

In 2008, an extended family member experienced an unplanned pregnancy.  Adoption was never in the mother’s mind, but seeing her situation and praying for wisdom for her and for her baby brought adoption back to the forefront of our minds and hearts.  God used that circumstance to flip the switch and we were ready to pursue adoption.

While we had planned, all those years, to adopt from China, by 2008 the wait for a healthy baby was simply too long.  Our oldest child was now nine and we wanted our children to be closer in age than the wait for China would allow.  And seeing reports and news stories about the conditions of the orphanages in the former Soviet countries really gave us a heart for those children.  We decided to pursue an adoption from the small central Asian county of Kyrgyzstan. 

At the time that we started our adoption from Kyrgyzstan, an adoption of a healthy infant boy would take less than one year.  We stepped out in faith.  We knew that God was calling us to adoption and we knew that God always provides when He calls His people.  We would be utterly dependent on God and His provision for the finances of the adoption.  We had our tax return and the Bush tax stimulus and I was finishing my last year of teaching school and could apply my last four month’s salary to the cost, but that still left us short by several thousand dollars.

We had heard of LifeSong for Orphans through various ministries and applied for a matching grant.  We had several friends and family who wanted to contribute to our adoption expenses, but we wanted them to have a means to give that would provide accountability for the funds and allow them the tax benefits that donations to non-profit entities carries. 

Kyrgyzstan was the first of the former Soviet states to declare independence.  They are a proud and beautiful people.  And we have fallen in love with their culture.  And in August 2008, we fell in love with a little Kyrgyz baby boy.  We had received our referral for a five month old baby boy!  We chose the name Asa James and flew to Kyrgyzstan in September 2008 to meet Asa.

Shortly after we returned home from meeting and bonding with Asa James, adoptions in Kyrgyzstan came to a halt.  A moratorium on international adoption has been in place since February 2009.  We, along with sixty five other American families, still wait to bring our child home. 

It has been difficult to say the least.  But God has been faithful to us and has brought so many people to stand beside us in the fight to bring Asa home. 

And with the moratorium in Kyrgyzstan, God was not finished calling us to step out in faith.  He was calling us to complete another adoption while we waited for Asa.  He called us back to China.  To the China special needs program.

While waiting for Asa, we learned a lot about the Waiting Child program in China.  With one biological child who has profound special needs, we did not think we should adopt another child who would have lifelong needs.  But we learned that so many children wait for families in China (and other countries) that have health or other issues that are very treatable in the United States. And they are certainly not lifelong needs.

We began our China Waiting Child adoption in January 2010.  With the matching grant and friend/family contributions from LifeSong for Orphans, we had prepaid all of our agency fees for our Kyrgyz adoption. Since that adoption was now on hold, we had a large credit with our agency.  The credit was just enough to cover the fees for the China program.  We finished our home study in record time and began assembling our dossier.  In February we got the call.  We had a referral for a beautiful baby boy!  Ezra Joseph was 10 months old and had been born with a cleft lip and palate.  While our hearts were guarded, having pictures of little Ezra only spurred us on to get our dossier finished as quickly as possible! 

We traveled to China in September 2010 and met little Ezra on September 19, 2010.  He became legally ours the next day!   Ezra is simply a delight and he fits right in with our crazy family!  His cleft lip was repaired in China and we had his palate repaired last December.  We have since had one more surgery to fix a small fistula in his palate.  And he has done wonderfully.  I was afraid of what the surgeries and hospital stays would do to the attachment we had formed, but our bond has only gotten stronger.  While we wish he did not have to endure painful surgeries and procedures, God has used those things to knit our hearts and make our family stronger.

We are in awe of how God used the journey to adopt ONE child to bring us two sons.  One of them naps in his crib right now; the other still waits for us."

Thank you Karla!  What a beautiful story!  And we will definitely keep your family in our prayers as you wait for little Asa to come home!

Family Friday: Keith and Tana

Meet Keith and Tana and their four little ones (three of which are within 15 months of each other!!!)

Aliyah Faith (Ludmia) and Christela Hope came home to Denver, CO from Haiti last January... 12 days after the earthquake.  In the midst of sorrow and devastation, God chose to work good for two precious little girls, who otherwise would have waited for another 1-3 years to come home to their forever family.

Today, instead of waiting for a home, Aliyah and Christela are thriving with two brothers and a mommy and daddy who LOVE them!

We want to thank Lifesong for Orphans again for your support of us in our adoption process!  

We are so thankful to have our girls home... to see their smiles and laughs.  And we know that the Lord has given them such a life of hope now... and a family that loves them.  

Your support was huge for us... both financially and as a confirmation that we were hearing the Lord correctly.  Even though we didn't have the funds to bring these two precious girls home, He did!  And He provided!

Keith and Tana

Thanks, Keith and Tana!  We at Lifesong are blessed to be a part of your story!

 

Family Friday: Marc and Amy

Marc and Amy adopted their sweet 3-year-old Zoe June, who has Down Sydnrome, from Ukraine.  

We named her Zoe June to honor a time in June when God reached down in our lives and our marriage and began a great work of redemption!  Zoe June means "abundant life in June".

Little Zoe with her new siblings

Lifesong, through the funding of a private donor, was blessed to be able to provide this family with a matching grant!  Earlier this week we received this note in the mail:

Thank you, Marc and Amy!  We love you too!

 If you would like to read more about Marc and Amy's story click HERE!

Adoption Resources

As we serve more and more families, we are often asked what resources are available for adoptive families to prepare their hearts and homes to welcome a 'child from a hard place'.

Check out our newly-renovated Adoption Resources page! Pass it along to anyone that you think it could be helpful to!

Please share any additional resources that have been helpful to you both pre and post-adoption.

LET'S ENCOURAGE THE BODY OF CHRIST AS WE WALK THIS JOURNEY TOGETHER!

Simple Idea, Big Opportunities

Simple Idea, Big Opportunities 

Lifesong's Outside the Walls Network

by Michael Monroe

Our initial dream for the Tapestry Adoption Fund was simple - to help as many children & families experience the blessing of adoption as our resources would allow. By partnering with Lifesong and utilizing the strategic tools of matching grants and interest-free loans, the fund was designed to help qualified families in a tangible and practical way as they follow God's call to travel the adoption journey. 

Our fund began with a modest balance - just enough to help about three families. Without much fanfare or really any plan to raise additional funds, we moved forward in faith, confident that with the help of Lifesong we could make a real difference as we faithfully pursued the vision that God had given us for our ministry. With each grant or loan awarded, we faithfully told the stories of how God was using the Tapestry Fund to bless the lives of families. As we did, more and more people wanted to give to the fund.  In only a few years, our relatively modest-sized fund has been blessed to play a small part in welcoming 24 children into loving, Christian families.

But along the way something interesting happened;

something that was entirely unexpected, although I am learning to always expect the unexpected from God when it comes to anything related to adoption. 

A couple of years ago we became aware of a simple fact - there are more qualified Christian families facing financial hurdles than there are available funds to help them. In fact, Christian adoption funding orgs are forced to turn down many more qualified applicants than they are able to help due to lack of available funds. And yet we know that God's provision is always sufficient. So we began to ask ourselves how our small fund might be more effective in meeting needs. What we soon discovered completely changed the way we view the Tapestry Fund and church adoption funds in general.

After much prayer and discussion with Lifesong, we concluded that God could use our fund in greater ways for His glory if we would seek to make our financial resources available outside the walls of our church. So we began to ask ourselves, 

"If we have money in our fund that is just sitting there with no use for it in sight, why wouldn't we joyfully say 'yes' to helping a qualified Christian family at a church across town or across the country if their church fund doesn't currently have sufficient resources or is just getting started?" 

After all, it's not really "our" money, and what better way to allow God to fulfill the dream He gave us of helping as many as our resources would allow. For us the decision was simple: Far worse than our fund "running out of money" would be for us to pass on the opportunity to be a tangible part of a story that God is writing with the lives of those He has called to this journey, simply because we had not looked outside of ourselves and our own church.

From this simple idea, the Outside the Walls Network (OTWN) was born. By joining the OTWN, Lifesong enables us to truly work together in a way that not only maximizes the stewardship of financial resources, but also broadens our impact in the lives of children and families. Lifesong offers participation in the OTWN to church funds at no cost and no additional administrative burden. To join, a church simply needs to communicate to Lifesong its desire to become part of the OTWN. There's no obligation for an OTWN church fund to say "yes" to any specific funding need that is presented, but as we discovered last year when we funded a family from Louisville that was waiting to bring their son 

home from Korea, the opportunity to say "yes" is truly a privilege and a blessing.

Over 15 churches have already joined, and our prayer is that many more churches will partner with Lifesong and come together in this important effort.  To learn more about the Outside the Walls Network or to join, contact Rich Metcalfe  - rich@lifesongfororphans.org

Michael Monroe, together with his wife Amy, leads Tapestry, the adoption and foster care ministry at Irving Bible Church (  www.tapestryministry.org).

 

Share the highlights of the last year in your 

orphan care / adoption / foster care ministries!