We are adopting a baby!
We are longing and preparing to bring a child into our family and we are beyond excited! I cannot wait for each of you to meet him or her. As part of this adoption process, we have started a crowdfunding campaign. You may be surprised to hear that adoption related costs can easily total up to $35,000 or more. We have set a goal of $19,160 that will exclusively cover adoption related expenses: legal fees, agency fees, home study, and most importantly costs associated with the care of the birth mother and baby through our adoption agency. Matt and I have personally contributed to this adoption and we have applied for several grants, yet we cannot do this on our own. We need our community, our village to help us bring our baby home! We hope to be fully funded by the end of the year. Please pray for us as we navigate this adoption, we are trusting wholeheartedly in God's strength for this journey and for the rest of our lives as a family. If you feel led to participate in this adoption financially- we are so humbled and grateful! We hope that by inviting you into this process, you will see yourself as part of the community we hope to build around our child as he or she grows up!
This is surreal, some days all we can think about is the adoption and other days it feels like it’s so far away. Yet, overall it has been such a joyful, life changing experience already. It is hard to be vulnerable and share our story, but we need your prayers and support and we also want you to feel part in bringing our baby home - truly we could not do this adoption, parenting, and life thing without our community.
We met in college and a few years later married in Atlanta, Ga. We moved to Athens and began to make our lives together here. When we were dating adoption had crossed our minds a little bit, Savanna having spent many summers in international countries with great needs, one of those primary needs being orphan care. She says now she always felt somewhere deep that adoption would be a part of her story and that God was using those summers as the beginning. As most things in our life, God had a messier story for us than we wanted, but a more beautiful one than we could have hoped.
Infertility has been a refining part of our lives together so far. We had been trying to start a family for 3 years, and after one particularly heartbreaking doctor's appointment in April 2017 we fled to one of our favorite little towns in North Carolina. We went for the weekend just to process and get away from what felt like this, looming cloud in our lives. When we look back on that weekend, we feel sadness for our hurt, but we also feel immense gratefulness for the what God began to unveil in our hearts. We were processing God’s plan for our family and we both started to step back and put all of our options on the table again and consider what was next for us. The Lord so quickly began to show us that he was calling us to forgo any further medical help, and to pursue Adoption. At first, our thoughts were “wait! the money… the unknown… the hard conversations that will await us and our child. Oh and we are so tired from this whole infertility thing so, can we really launch ourselves in this completely unforeseen and complicated process?” Over the coming months God began to put people strategically in our path, songs on our mind, books on our list, prayers on others hearts, and hope in our brokenness.
Other than our wedding day, we have never been more sure of anything in our lives than this adoption. The privilege it is to receive the gift of a child and parenthood is not lost on us. We believe God first adopted us, we believe he has called us to adoption as a tangible example of his grace and love in our lives. We cannot wait to hold our child, to hear their cry and feel their skin. We have already begun to feel incredible healing and we walk confidently into this next chapter for us. Our hope is not in a perfect process, a perfect child, or us as perfect parents, but in a gracious and merciful God who has given us more than we can stand. Adoption is not our plan B, it has been plan A for us all along. There is a specific time and a specific child in which God will choose to grow our family. Please join us in prayer and we wait and hope!
