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Showing posts from April, 2018

Ashley's Story Of Why Adoption

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It's hard to know where to start. God has taken our family on a journey of loving other people and looking back it's very cool to see how He has changed our hearts and minds over the past few years. About 3 years ago we got involved in Safe Families (it's a program similar to foster care but they partner with churches instead of the state and the goal is to reunite kids with their parents). In the 2 years we did Safe Families (SF) we had about 12 kids in and out of our home. Some stayed as little as 24 hours and one boy lived with us for 5 months. It was challenging in many ways but was rewarding as well. We loved watching our kids love on these children they had never met. Our kids shared everything with these kids (their rooms, toys and clothes), they embraced them as siblings and loved having extra kids in our home. Sometime during our SF years, God was speaking to me about adoption but I just wasn't fully ready to listen yet. I felt very confident that He had othe...

Austin's Story of Why Adoption

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So my story starts about 6 weeks ago (Feb 2018) while I was at church. During one of the worship songs, I looked to my right and saw a new mom holding her baby, I then looked at my wife and back to the stage. In that moment I sensed God's voice telling me that we need to adopt. I was scared, excited, nervous, and emotional all in the same moment. I started to cry (which is rare for me) and as we sat down after worship was over, I wrote on the bulletin to Ashley "I feel like God just spoke to me on adoption." She responded on paper with "I'm in." And then a moment later with "Caiden will be excited." In that moment I knew we were in for a ride.

Here we go (April 2018)

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We know we want to do a domestic adoption and we have had a few friends at church who have used the same adoption agency so we figured we'd apply and see what happens. We were SHOCKED at the cost! We had no idea the whole thing would be so expensive. We actually had a hard time at first making sense of the price. It's like a business which is kind of disheartening. We still applied because we wanted a chance to have our questions answered, after our phone interview I (Ashley) felt a peace about things. Austin was still totally freaked about the money but he's the provider for our family so I understand that. We've looked at a few more agencies online but haven't decided yet if we're going to contact them or not, they are all more expensive but all seem to do the same thing. Saturday night we were laying in bed talking about a lot of different things but Austin said he wanted to pray specifically for someone to offer to help us financially with the adoption ...