We have BIG news!
We are overjoyed to announce that we are ADOPTING!
We are beyond excited and are doing everything we can to be prepared to welcome a beautiful new life into our home.
As many of you know, we have been seeking to grow our family for the past six years, experiencing great joys and great sorrows along the way. Sharing our adoption story with the world now brings on new levels of tenderness and vulnerability, but we know that we cannot do it alone. We are built for community, and we are thankful to YOU, our wonderful community to help us bring home our miracle!
ABOUT US
Welcome to our adoption journey! Our names are Katherine and Bill Williams. We were married in 2018 and live in Fort Mill, SC, where Katherine is a Speech Language Pathologist at Kings Town Elementary School and Bill is an estimator with State Utility Contractors and a U.S. Army veteran. Our faith and our family are the most important part of our lives. We are active members of New River Church and love spending time with our wonderful families in Tega Cay and Spartanburg. In our free time, we enjoy working on home improvement projects and cuddling with our adorable kitty, Huk. Katherine has a knack for gardening, baking, and party planning, while Bill is an active fisherman and takes every chance he can to spend time outdoors.
It would be our greatest privilege to be chosen for the role of mom and dad through adoption, and to provide a loving, secure, Christ-centered home to a precious child. Thank you for considering how you could partner with us.
FERTILITY JOURNEY
Starting a family has been a deep desire of ours from the very beginning of our marriage. After more than a year of trying to grow our family naturally, we sought out fertility testing and found out that best chance of having a baby was through in vitro fertilization (IVF). In the five years that followed, we endured five rounds of IVF. Our first attempt sadly resulted in a non-viable embryo, meaning that we would need to start process again with another egg retrieval. Unfortunately, complications from this procedure put Katherine in the hospital with a serious infection for 10 days. While in the hospital, we learned that the embryos from that round also did not survive.
After this experience, we made the decision not to retrieve any more of Katherine’s eggs, and opened our hearts to other avenues of loving and nurturing a child. This led us to Embryo Adoption, a form of IVF where the embryo from another family is transferred to Katherine for her to carry. In the following three years, we adopted three precious embryos. Very sadly, none of these embryo transfers were successful. Due to the financial demand of IVF, as well as the physical tolls of injections, bloodwork, ultrasounds, etc., we chose to end our IVF journey in March 2024.
As you can imagine, we have been grieving this loss and trying to process all this means for us and our future. Through the peaks and valleys, the Lord has been our source of comfort and hope. He has used this trial to transform us from the inside out, making us more like Him - building our perseverance, our character and our trust in Him.
OUR NEXT CHAPTER
We still have a deep desire to be parents, to raise, care for and love a child as our own. We have prayed diligently and asked the Lord for guidance and direction in our pursuit of parenthood. Over the last several months, we have felt led to explore adoption as a way to grow our family. We believe that adoption parallels our acceptance into God’s family (Ephesians 1:4-5) and as Christians we are called to care for orphans (Psalm 82:3; Matthew 25:40). Through a series of broken and beautiful events, we now feel that the Lord has called us to adoption- and we want to be obedient to His calling. Undeniably, God is doing something beyond what we understand or could imagine. We feel His peace and we believe that He is working to bring beauty from ashes!
OUR AGENCY
We have chosen to partner with Nightlight Christian Adoptions and have been accepted into their Domestic Infant Adoption Program. They have a wonderful reputation and we have heard nothing but wonderful things about them from alumni families. Nightlight has been a trusted 501(c)(3) adoption agency since 1959. They have helped complete more than 3,000 domestic adoptions. Nightlight’s mission is to place children in permanent homes with loving families, “working in the name of Jesus, the light of the world, who made it possible for us to be adopted into God’s family.”
FUNDRAISING GOAL
As part of our adoption process, we have started a crowdfunding campaign. It may surprise you to hear that adoption-related costs can easily total up to $40,000 or more. This is why we have set a total goal of $30,000 to help ease the financial burden that often overwhelms adoptive parents.
Our first and most immediate goal was to raise $10,000 over the next 8 weeks, by August 31, 2024. We met this goal AHEAD of SCHEDULE! God is so GOOD! Our next goal is a total of $20,000 raised by November 1st, 2024. These funds will help us to cover legal fees, matching fees, adoption related medical expenses for our baby and travel expenses to bring our baby home.
Thank you for considering making a donation to our fundraising goals! Nightlight contributions are 100% tax deductible, and they even offer options for corporate matching and donor-advised funds. You may also send a check directly to Nightlight, which would remove the 5% processing fee.
BRINGING HOME BABY WILLIAMS
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/she grows up. If you are not able to support our adoption financially, we hope you will join us in prayer for our adoption process and our journey to bring home Baby Williams.
Finally, we would like to thank all of our loyal friends and family who have supported us over the past six years with their encouragement, prayers, and support! We feel so blessed to have you cheering us on in this next chapter. Glory be to God! The best is yet to come!
With all our love and gratitude,
Katherine and Bill Williams
Jeremiah 29:11
