And so it begins.
The Brogan family - Chad and Christa, plus the two crazy kiddos pictured above - has begun the journey of adoption.
Through this blog, we hope to share all the details of the process. Before now we were pretty clueless about the minutia of international adoption. We have friends who have been through it, but our personal knowledge and experience was nonexistent. If you follow this blog, you will learn as we learn, rejoice as we rejoice, and cry as we cry.
We will start this first post with some backstory.
Psalm 16:5
A little over three years ago, the Lord placed the call for adoption on my heart. At that time, He had not yet placed that calling on the heart of my husband. My (then) small group began regularly praying about adoption for the Brogans. We wanted to be open to God's will, not our own desires or cultural influences. So our small group prayer was not just that my DH would be open to adoption, but that we would be united in following God's direction. We prayed that if adoption was not part of our path, he would remove the desire from my heart. And if it was His will for us to adopt, that He would lead Chad to that end.
--Shout out to my small group friends, P and D, who faithfully prayed for almost two years about this very request.--
At some point during this two-year prayer walk, Chad expressed his openness to the idea of adopting. This was about a year or so ago.
--Shout out to Chad's faithful small group friends, R and K, who prayed then and continue to pray about this journey.--
Chad and I had prayed together and talked extensively throughout these years about all of this. Once we both had the desire to add to our family, we prayed about how to go about it. Our church (read: our family, our home, our community) has several ministries for families involved in adopting, fostering, and orphan care. Several families in our Sunday school community (Heritage Builders 4 Life!) work within these ministries or have adopted themselves. We had access to multiple opportunities.
Foster care is a prevalant topic and experience at our church and among our friends. Chad and I felt let to pursue adopting from foster care. Like many, we felt compassion and love for abandoned or neglected children. Imagining a child feeling unwanted or unloved just makes my heart physically hurt. [More on the pull to and away from fostering in a future blog.]
We were not open to international adoption at that time. Our reasoning was that the "need" was here, so we should meet it here. In truth, the need is everywhere.
Thus began our attempts at foster care certification. Don't worry! 'Attempts' does not mean we were denied certification. It means God clearly had a different way in mind for us. So he did that thing where he closed doors without us understanding why over a long period of time.
Our church serves as a training location for local agencies including DHR/DHS to certify people for fostering. We started there. We signed up to attend an informational meeting last year as the first step to certification. That class was cancelled because not enough people signed up. The next quarter, we could not find any information about classes. I think they were simply not offered. Then, finally, over the Christmas holidays, we registered for the next session of classes. We set up child care, completed the registration form - we thought we were set.
Then the facilitator emailed to inform me that the state had changed some of the certification rules and we could not be certified through those classes. That training was only for residents of a different county. The classes for our county were too far away and happened too late at night for us to commit to because of our work schedules and current kid bedtimes.
Surrender. White flag. God, in His perfect wisdom, knew. He knew we needed to be here - adopting from Colombia. And we didn't even know.
So how did we go from Jefferson County to Colombia?
Well, that is a story for the next blog post.
As always, I will link to our adoption fundraising site below.
Thank you for your prayers and encouragement. Those are most precious to us.
Hugs,
Christa
Our gofundme page
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