Belonging

Please note - this website has changed to http://journeytobelonging.blogspot.com

All information can be found there!! Thanks for following our journey!

Several people have asked where we are at now in our 'process'.  Here's an update. Our file is ready to be sent to South Africa as soon as the social worker in South Africa is ready to receive it.  There has been a huge back up in the system there due to the World Cup and then due to a restructuring in the way adoptions are processed in South Africa.  Due to the back up, there are many waiting families that have been waiting extra long for a placement! This back up also leaves a lot of files for the social worker to process.... so once several placements have been made with children matched with families who have already been waiting, our file will be sent.  Once the South African social worker has our file, she will work within the children she is licensed to work with, and seek to place a child into our family.  This wait for a placement could happen quickly or be up to 18 months long.  Once we do get a referral of a child, we will travel a few weeks later for the court proceedings and spend 3-4 weeks in South Africa getting acquainted with our child and her beautiful country and finalizing paperwork. How we long for that time!!  We have talked many times over the last few days about how we hope that next Christmas there will be four children around our table! Our hearts are longing to meet our little daughter! Yes, daughter - we have been approved to adopt a girl born after November 16, 2008 (making her at least 18 months younger than Daniel).  We are so excited to see who God has in store for our family; we pray for her health and well-being now, and we pray we may be a blessing in her life.  Can't wait!!

This evening we went as a family to watch the African Children's Choir concert in Niagara Falls. It was a great concert and we all loved it - the kids were very impressed with all their singing and dancing! It made the kids super excited about our adoption too - one of the countries that the African Children's Choir works with is South Africa, though this choir was from Uganda. Before going to the concert we went out for supper to celebrate the completion of our government paperwork thus far!! What a fun night to enjoy and to dream!

We came across this article...heartbreaking and eye opening. It's so hard for us to even comprehend this in North America.

http://news.adoption.com/uni/frame.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fhome%2Fyou%2Farticle-1291137%2FWhy-South-Africa-braced-unwanted-baby-boom.html&name=Why+South+Africa+is+braced+for+an+unwanted+baby+boom++|+Mail+Online

This is our story as we shared it at an Orphan Awareness Evening at our church...

Answer the Cry – Orphan Evening & Our Story

Throughout our marriage, we have often talked about foster care and adoption as something we would like to incorporate into our family.  We saw adoption as a testimony of how we have been adopted as God’s children through Jesus and we sensed that God intended for that testimony to live in our family. Yet, we weren’t sure when or how this would happen, so we always left it to when God would show us that the time was right.  We created our own plan to have 4 biological children first and we would then look into foster care/adoption at that point. Well, God had a different plan for us. In August 2008, we miscarried our 4th child and Devon went home to be with Jesus sooner than we had hoped for.  We then went through a period where we were unable to conceive.  Our neat little boxed plan was thrown out! Last January – 2010 – God spoke into our hearts and revealed that now was the time to look into adoption in our family.  We spent several days in prayer, asking God to affirm this call we felt on our lives for our family. 

God affirmed it in many ways - through readings I was doing with the kids in school – one true story the next day about a boy who had hardly a fighting chance at life and was adopted into a Christian home about a hundred years ago – this little boy went on to serve as a teacher and preacher.  When we wondered how we would shoulder the potential costs of the adoption, we would put it to God in prayer and each time, what we needed or asked for was given to us by someone who was simply following God’s prompting in their own life.  God put thoughts and images into our minds prompting us toward adoption, while at the same time God confirmed those promptings by simultaneously speaking of adoption to family members who then shared the promptings with us.  We shared these desires and hopes to adopt with our children and were again affirmed of this call.  Their eyes lit up with delight.  Our oldest commented “when you told us, I was so excited I almost cried” and in their prayers they have regularly prayed that this new child would feel at home in our family and be kept safe and that this child would know God too.

 

As we have researched and read about adoption we have been amazed at what God has revealed about himself through the act of adoption. We are convinced that the more we consider God’s gracious work of adopting us into His family, the more we will see and appreciate His glory, grace, beauty, love, etc. Adoption is first about the glorious God of the universe coming to profoundly needy people in the person of His Son to give us adoption as sons (Galatians 4:5; Ephesians 1:5). When we grow in our understanding of who this God of grace is and what He has done to adopt us through Jesus Christ, we will find our love for Him, pursuit of Him, and joy in Him steadily increasing. Secondly, as Christians better understand God’s adoption of us, Christians themselves are joyfully compelled to extend this same kind of compassion to orphans, both here and abroad, whether through caring for orphans directly or indirectly, adopting a child, or assisting others in the adoption process. In this we see that Adoption is vertical before it is horizontal. Vertical adoption is what God does; horizontal adoption is what we do. Adoption was invented by God even before He created the world (Ephesians 1:3-5). It is how God brings us into His family with all the rights and privileges of Jesus, our Elder Brother.

 

Back to our specific story… Initially we knew we were called to adopt, but we weren’t clear on which direction, whether it would be local or international. We registered with the local agency, but left our options open, by arranging the training we needed as required by the Ontario government on our own.  We took the 4 days of training on adoption and in the mean time met with a social worker for several intensive interviews about ourselves and our families so she could prepare a report on us for the government to approve and for other workers to become familiar with us.

Over time, through the many prayers and searching, we felt God nudging us more and more to international adoption.  Through prayer, research and discussion, God showed us the country of South Africa.  I had been reading through the book of Deuteronomy at this time and several times throughout this book reference is made to caring for the widows and orphans of the world.  In my devotions one evening, I read in the margin of the daily planner from the Bible League from Isaiah 42:20: “You have seen many things, but have paid no attention; your ears are open but you hear nothing.” And the comment that followed said, “Today, God speaks to you in his word. Today he will speak to you through some of the people you will meet and the things that will fill up your day. But will you hear his voice? Why is it so hard to hear God in your life?”  I had been reading it throughout Deuteronomy and even later that evening in Deut 10:18, “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien giving him food and clothing.”  Earlier that day while I was doing errands I saw a darker skinned little girl yell out “mommy!!” to a light skinned woman who scooped her up; and my heart smiled.  In addition, that day I made contact with Nicole, who I thought was part of a general adoption forum, but she lead a forum for South African adoptive families and the site looked amazing and so helpful.  A few days later we met with our adoption worker through the local agency and had a good meeting and she gave us her blessing and encouragement to pursue an international adoption and within two hours we received an email indicating that we were accepted into the South African program with the agency we hoped to work with.

  At that point we did some calculations on the money we had started setting aside and realized that once the payments were made that needed to happen in the next few weeks we would have $0.17 to spare!  And again and again over the last several months, we’ve had additional payments due and each time we weren’t sure exactly where the money was going to come from, but it was always there right when we needed it. 

 The money we have to pay is not ‘buying a child,’ but it covers numerous fees throughout the process such as fees for the courses we have taken, fees for the social worker to prepare our documents, fees for the government to process paperwork both the Canadian government and in South Africa, fees for our adoption agency “Mission of TEARS”, fees for our travel to South Africa when the time comes to meet and bring home our child, and finally a financial gift to the orphanage that our child will come from. 
 

Throughout the past several months we have begun to learn all we can about South Africa, her people, her history, her culture, …anything we can learn. We have watched movies and read books, researched online…we want to know all we can about the heritage of our child so that we can raise this child with a strong grasp of their unique and beautiful heritage.  South Africa will forever be an integral part of our family.

In terms of where we are at in the process…. We have completed our homestudy and are waiting for the Ontario government to give their official stamp of approval which should be coming any day, and we are waiting for the government to approve part 1 of our child’s citizenship application.  We have taken the PRIDE course – an adoption and foster care course required by the government of Ontario and we have taken a course in transracial parenting recently which was also very helpful.  In January of 2011, Lord willing, our file will go to South Africa to the Social worker there that Mission of TEARS, works with – she will then use our profile to match us with a child that would be a good fit for our family.  When we hear that a child has been referred to us – which could be anywhere from days of our file being received to about 18 months from now - we will give our approval and then within a month we will be off for South Africa to meet our child, and complete the necessary court requirements. We will be in SA for about 3-4 weeks (our other children will be staying behind at that time).  Then we will return to Canada with our newest family member and transition to being a family of six.  Feel free to continue to follow along on our website as we post blog postings, prayer needs, and other information.

Throughout this journey, we have become increasingly aware of the enormity of the orphan crisis in the world today. There are over 140 million orphans throughout the world.  140 million!! We can’t even fathom that kind of number. We want to do so much more than adopt one child – we want to be able to give back, to continue to support the needs of more orphans throughout the world.  We in the west have so much, more than we will ever need. There are so many great organizations at work and there are so many other needs beyond adoption – sponsoring children, donating to projects/orphanages that continue to pour into the lives of orphans within their countries. James 1:27 states, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Clearly we are called by God throughout the Bible to care for the orphans of the world. 

This weekend we had an opportunity to attend a transracial training course to help prepare us for the unique perspectives and challenges that we will encounter as a result of adopting from South Africa. The seminar was a good experience for us as it confirmed many thoughts we already had and it equipped us with new insights to help us welcome our little one into our family. One reality that saddened us was the place of black characters in children’s toys. All of Disney’s princesses are white (with the exception of the little known Tiana from “The Princess and the Frog”), few retail stores stock Barbie’s black friend Christie (and when they do, her price is typically cheaper which is a sad value statement in itself), and Playmobile’s only black character is barbaric looking tribesman. Almost across the board, black toys are grossly out numbered by white counter parts, are very difficult to find, or portray a negative social connotation - all of these factors give a subtle message to black children that their skin colour makes them less of a person. It pains us to see these disparities as just a small area of difficulty that our child will need to struggle with that our current children will not need to wrestle with.

Yet we were also encouraged by the positive role of the immediate family which can carry the child through nearly any difficulty. Home is the place where our child will find identity and belonging. Furthermore, society at large is becoming more educated and sensitive to these disparities, and hopefully we will see more great changes in the next few decades. It was a great day of learning that again makes us excited to meet our child and bring our child home.

There is so much more we could share and we’d love to do so in person or through further questions. Please feel free to ask us anything and we’ll do our best to walk through it together.

Throughout this adoption journey, God has placed a strong desire on our hearts to do more.  He has been placing on our hearts the enormity of the orphan situation in the world.  As November is Adoption Awareness Month/Orphan Awareness - a few organizations joined together to create a DVD regarding this very issue.  Many people have asked us to share also of our story leading to this adoption; what the journey has looked like; and what it may look like in the future.  So, we are combining these desires and questions into an evening.  The details are on the picture/poster above.  If you are able to join us, let us know! It will be at our church here in Welland on Saturday, November 27 at 7:30pm. Please join us!

I love looking through various adoption blogs and seeing how God has worked in the lives of many ordinary families trusting in Him to bring about his perfect plans.  To see the "Gotcha Day" videos of when these children entered their forever families, to hear about how finances were met exactly when needed, to see these children flourish and grow in their homes filled with love. It gets us excited for what is to come!! I also love listening to different songs and stumbling upon different songs that speak right into my/our hearts at the time.  This video really moved me and I wanted to share it...praise God that we have been adopted as His children!!

A friend recently recommended that we watch the movie "Faith Like Potatoes" - it's a true story about "a farmer who risked everything for God."  It takes place in South Africa (which is why my friend had recommended it to us!) - in fact it takes place in the region of Kwa-Zulu Natal - the region our child will likely come from.  Angus Buchan moves his family to SA in the late 1970s to start new on a farm - shortly after arriving, God moves in his life and draws Angus into a deep and meaningful relationship with Him.  We loved watching this movie and learning more through the extra "special features".  Angus' passion for God and his deep faith that God could truly do the impossible moved us.  In many ways, we felt connected to this movie, as we saw the beautiful country of South Africa unfolding on the screen, as we saw the ways that God is truly at work in South Africans today, and as we continue in our journey of faith in God and his provisions in this adoption journey.  We can hardly wait to go to South Africa, to learn more about this country, the birthplace of our next child, to experience it all firsthand.  Perhaps we will even be able to visit "Shalom Ministries" - the actual farm that Angus began which grew into a beautiful ministry.  Their website can be viewed at http://shalomtrust.co.za


If you have a chance, pick up the book or movie - it's worth a read or a view! Here are some favourite quotes that came from the book and/or movie:

"God is not interested in your ability, he's interested in your availability." -Angus Buchan

"The least I can do is be available and give my life in service to Him."

"Hope is spelled J-E-S-U-S!"

"Faith must be real --- feel it, smell it -- just like potatoes."

"God loves to open doors for  us when we walk in faith." p. 114

"How many coincidences do you need to see before you accept the fact that there is such a thing as a 'God-incidence'?" p. 115

"If we want our family lives to conform to God's will, Jesus must be our priority, our focal point, in our homes as well as in our ministries." p. 167

"William Carey, the great Baptist missionary, said, 'Attempt great things for God and expect great things from God.' My heart witnesses to that challenge. At Shalom we have a saying that if your vision doesn't scare you, it isn't big enough." p 145

We have a copy of Russell Moore's book Adopted for Life and really appreciated the perspective and approach he takes towards adoption. It is a well written book. Below is an excerpt taken from his website at http://www.russellmoore.com .

Is the Orphan My Neighbor?

— Thursday, October 7th, 2010 —

I will never forget seeing her pull the measuring tape out of her purse as she talked about the skull of her child.

The woman, standing in an airport in Russia with my wife and me, was, like us, an American. She, like us, was in the former Soviet Union to pursue adoption. But she was worried. She had heard “horror stories” about fetal alcohol syndrome and various other nightmares. She said that the measuring tape was for gauging the size of the craniums of her potential children, to “make sure there’s nothing wrong with them.”

The reason I think about this conversation so much these days is because I am finding—more and more often—that one of the primary obstacles for Christians in advocating for the fatherless can be summed up right there in that measuring tape: the issue of fear. As much as we might not want to admit it, many of us don’t think much about orphans because, frankly, we’re scared of them.

Orphans are unpredictable. Often we don’t know where they’ve come from, what kind of genetic maladies and urges lie dormant somewhere in those genes. Moreover, in virtually every situation of fatherlessness, there is some kind of tragedy: a divorce, a suicide, a rape, a drug overdose, a disease, a drought, a civil war, and on and on. We’d rather not think about such things, and we’re afraid often of what kind of lasting mark they leave on their victims.

Those of us who know Christ ought to recognize that fear is often a deterrent to justice, a deterrent that has been indicted, crucified, and buried in the triumph of Jesus. In Jesus’ story of the so-called “good Samaritan,” after all, Jesus presents us with a man who “fell among robbers” and was beaten, nearly to death (Lk. 10:30). With little commentary on why, Jesus tells us, simply, that two passers-by, both religious officials, moved on to the other side, to avoid the wounded man (Lk. 10:31-32).

While many have speculated that there might have been theological reasons behind their neglect (the fear of becoming ceremonially unclean from touching a corpse), the most compelling reason I’ve ever heard was from Martin Luther King, Jr., who wondered whether the passers-by were simply afraid.

After all, there were no streetlights on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho—the setting of this story. There was no police force. A man beaten by terrorists is a good signal that the evildoers are still about, perhaps hiding in the caves along the roadside, lying in wait for their next victim. Moving on along, quickly and quietly, probably just seemed like prudence.

But Jesus never was one for justification by prudence alone. He praised a Samaritan—a reviled outcast from the official religious structures—for the compassion he demonstrated toward this man. And the compassion Jesus commended—and commanded from us in imitation—wasn’t mere charity. The Samaritan didn’t simply help the beaten man; he gave him his own animal, set him up in an inn, and paid for all his expenses for his ongoing care (Lk. 10:34-35). Any Israelite hearing this account would have seen immediately what was going on. The Samaritan was treating the beaten man like family.

Right now, there is a crisis of fatherlessness all around the world. Chances are, in your community, the foster care system is bulging with children, moving from home to home to home, with no rootedness or permanence in sight. Right now, as you read this, children are “aging out” of orphanages around the world. Many of them will spiral downward into the hopelessness of drug addiction, prostitution, or suicide. Children in the Third World are languishing in group-homes, because both parents have died from disease or have been slaughtered in war. The curse is afoot, and it leaves orphans in its wake.

Not every Christian is called to adopt or to foster children. And not every family is equipped to serve every possible scenario of special needs that come along with particular children. Orphan care isn’t easy. Families who care for the least of these must count the cost, and be willing to offer up whatever sacrifice is needed to carry through with their commitments to the children who enter into their lives.

But, while not all of us are called to adopt, the Christian Scriptures tell us that all of us are called to care “widows and orphans in their distress” (Jas. 1:27). All of us are to be conformed to the mission of our Father God, a mission that includes justice for the fatherless (Exod. 22:22; Deut. 10:18; Ps. 10:18; Prov. 23:10-11; Isa. 1:17; Jer. 7:6; Zech. 7:10). As we are conformed to the image of Christ, we share with him his welcoming of the oppressed, the abandoned, the marginalized; we recognize his face in the “least of these,” his little brother and sisters (Matt. 25:40).

The followers of Jesus should fill in the gap left by a contemporary Western consumer culture that extends even to the conception and adoption of children. Who better than those who have been welcomed by Christ to care for the most feared and least sought after of the world’s orphans? After all, who are we, as those who are the invited to Jesus’ wedding feast? We are “the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame” (Lk. 14:21). Since that is the case, Jesus tells us, we are to model the same kind of risk-taking, unconditional love (Lk. 14:12), the kind that casts out fear.

Yes, orphan care can be risky. Justice for the fatherless will sap far more from us than just the time it takes to advocate. These kids need to be reared, to be taught, to be hugged, to be heard. Children who have been traumatized often need more than we ever expect to give. It is easier to ignore those cries. But love of any kind is risky.

The Gospel means it’s worth it to love, even to the point of shedding your own blood. After all, that’s what made a family for ex-orphans like us.

http://www.russellmoore.com/2010/10/07/is-the-orphan-my-neighbor/