We were open to the Lord leading us anywhere to adopt. A parentless child is a parentless child. But being stationed in Okinawa, Japan, we naturally looked here first. Despite all our efforts, we found it nearly impossible to adopt a Japanese child.
In the meantime, as we were reading one particular book together, Adopted for Life, by Russell Moore, we became excited about international adoption, Russia in particular. Through lots of prayer we decided to go in that direction.
In God’s grace, there were two other couples on Okinawa who were at the same stage as we were – the beginning! We all pitched in and flew a representative from A Love Beyond Borders out of Colorado to conduct our home studies in order to see if we are fit to adopt. We all passed!
Once we passed our home study, we researched and chose Christian World Adoption as our agency to help us adopt from Russia. They told us we could have a child in about a year! The paperwork and online adoption classes required to qualify us for Russia took us about 7-8 months. It was December of 2012 and we had finished it all. We sent in all our paperwork to Washington D.C. to get notarized and one week later, President Vladimir Putin, for political retaliation against the U.S., closed Russia for adoptions.
We were devastated. We could do nothing about it. We grieved and prayed for about three weeks.
About the forth week, the Lord had encouraged us and we were compelled to look at different options. We called Christian World Adoption only to learn they had went bankrupt! The closure of Russia had effectively put them and many agencies out of business. We lost the money and the paperwork.
By God’s grace, we decided not to give up. We were open to adopt from any country. Due to various parental right laws, we found adopting from the U.S. would be incredibly difficult since we would be stationed here in Okinawa for another three years. So, we began looking at countries all over the world. We began finding that most of the countries would take about 3-5 years to get a child, including, sometimes, a long stay by both parents in the country.
We then learned that the adoption process for several African countries took about a year. After several conversations with each other, talking with friends, and a lot of prayer we choose Ethiopia.