Our Adoption Story
Our hearts for the orphans started out very small long time ago, as we participated in our church's mission trip to the orphanages in Korea. As our hearts grew, we looked for more personal ways to make a difference by sponsoring individual children and bringing gifts to the orphanages. We started to sponsor child through Compassion International and also Holt International by giving monthly to special need children.
After seeing the need of children at those facilities and knowing that there are so many children that are being abandoned by their biological parents; we could not go blind-eyed and just go on living our lives. At one vision retreat 7 years ago, God convicted our friends and family to go beyond helping these orphans through mission trips by adopting together as a community. Knowing what we know, we wanted to make a difference one child at a time. Thus, we made a commitment to adopt along with about 10 other people even when our 1st child was not even born.
2 years after that retreat, our head pastor’s family who also committed to adopt, started their adoption process. They now have their 4th child who is adopted. Beginning of this year, after so many years of waiting, three other families, including our family have started our journey to adopt. Its been a long time preparing, praying, and knowing that we will never be fully ready; but after having two children of our own, by the grace of God, we came to a realization that the best thing we can give to any child, is a family. We are far from being perfect, but in many ways, God has been shaping us to mature into a family that understands God's grace and we believed that one of the purpose of this was to provide a family for the orphans. Timing wise, it could not have been any better, with other friends in our community starting process together and even personally, we have strived to be good steward of God’s financial resource by becoming debt free to be in better position to be able to accommodate the child that is too come. Now we have started the adoption process and we are yet again, reminded of how it is a tremendous privilege and honor to be able to be granted such opportunity.
We started the process of adopting a child from Korea in February of this year. It has been only 10 months but it has been quite a journey. God was so gracious in preparing our family to receive such a precious gift and to be part of His work. During the process, He has left His fingerprints in every bit of our lives. He has strengthened our marriage, taught us how to be pure in finance and redirect our secular parenting ways to strive for the godly way. Though all this, we have built a firm on the foundation of Jesus, love for His Words and gained the desire for worship in all situations, good and bad. When we first started the process, we weren't expecting all these blessings. It was burdensome, heart aching and lots of tears of fear and doubts. But God never fails for sure! How great and awesome is that He has turned mourning into dancing and we are here living and experiencing the fullness of His amazing grace. God is good! He is good all the time!
Amen!
