Joy in the Journey: Our Journey To Jack

Our Adoption Journey

B and I met in high school and started dating our senior year. We went to college together and after graduating we married in 2004. B and I always knew we wanted a family, but we planned to wait a few years until we could “afford” children to start one. A few years went by and even though (by the world’s standards) we didn’t have a lot of money, the calling to be parents was strong. So, we decided to step out in faith and start our family.

Over the next five years, B and I experienced the deep heartache of infertility. We went a year before we did testing to find out why we couldn’t conceive. The test results revealed that we were normal and should be able to have a baby. On one hand, it was good, because there was no apparent problem, on the other hand, there was still no way to fix it! We just had to wait on God’s timing. I struggled for years dealing with the daily reality of this. Every month went by as disappointing as the next. I began to struggle with my faith. I tried to understand why God would put such a desire in our hearts to have children, and yet not allow us to become pregnant. This battle was even tougher due to my job being a nanny. It soon became difficult for me to get up to go to work and even do daily activities. But even when I was at my lowest point, God met me where I was. He began to change my heart. He made me realize that I was making having a child an idol over Him and that all my sufficiency should be in Him. Through much prayer and focusing on His Word, I began to pull myself out of this pit and my relationship with the Lord grew stronger than it had ever been before. And I would need this new found faith for what was to come.

After several failed IUI treatments, B and I began to consider adoption. At first, though, it was me more so than him. B was very concerned with the expenses involved in adoption and didn’t think that we would ever be able to afford it. But the more and more I looked into adoption, the more and more I felt that this was what God had been calling us to do all along. I would come across blogs of families that adopted and I was so inspired by the genuine love they had for their children and what a blessing it was. I would share these stories with B and soon his heart began to soften for the orphans of this world. Before we knew it, we found ourselves attending an adoption workshop in Charleston. After listening to adoptive parents’ stories and educating ourselves on the options we had, we left that place knowing 100% we were called to adopt from South Korea. Even though this was the biggest decision of our lives, in a way, it was also the easiest. We knew that God had inspired us to adopt and that He would provide the money we needed. All we had to do was trust Him.

Immediately, we began our applications and paperwork. It was a tough few months getting everything together we needed, but we did and soon we found ourselves waiting for our referral. During these months of waiting, God provided several opportunities to raise money for our adoption. We had a huge successful yard sale, an Ipad raffle, and I started my business, Getty Art Studio. We also received two grants and several donations from family and friends. It was obvious that God was in this plan of adoption and we were excited to see the plan unfold. But our faith was soon tested again.

In February of 2011, B and I found out, out of nowhere, we were pregnant! When I say out of nowhere, I mean that we weren’t even trying to get pregnant. Once our dossier went to Korea, we started to prevent pregnancy because we didn’t want anything to interfere with our adoption. At first, we were just shocked. It didn’t make since that after all these years, we would just get pregnant like that and in the middle of our adoption! But soon, we started to see this as a miracle. We became excited that we were pregnant and we rationalized that it must have been God’s plan to inspire us to adopt so that we would carry it through even after we discovered we could have biological children. So, soon we had to call our agency to tell them we were pregnant, so that they could put the adoption on hold (as required by South Korea). Needless to say, I cried through that whole conversation with our agency. I assured them that adoption wasn’t a solution to our problem of infertility, it was our calling and that we would be back! Little did I know how soon that would be.

When I was around 17 weeks pregnant, I scheduled an early ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby. We were planning a family vacation for the next week, so we wanted to know so we could surprise everyone. Long story short, at the appointment, we discovered that our baby had no heartbeat. We learned that it had just passed at about 16 weeks. Again, we were devastated. We couldn’t believe that God would allow something like this happen to us. It seemed that after all that we had been through, it just couldn’t be part of His plan to take away our miracle baby! It was tough to understand all of this, but with time, we healed from this too. We came to understand that maybe God was expanding our testimony to help others. And from our past experience, we knew too that something good would come out of all of this. Just like the adoption did from our infertility (Our Blessing of Infertility). Knowing that we could pick back up on our adoption after all of this was hopeful as well. I would encourage you to read more about how that healing process came about in my blog post, Trusting Him.