Adoption Testimony

    As one our required documents for an application we had to write up an adoption testimony. I thought I'd share it with those who are interested.

    God has been actively involved in bringing Vanda Anna and us together for many years. We appreciate your willingness to be a part of His plan. Over the last five or so years, God has been stirring in our hearts, to know more about adoption. The words of James 1:27 kept coming to mind. “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” (New International Version). 

    Two years ago, Latvia was looking at reducing funding for foster care. New Horizons for Children started including these foster homes in their listing of children for hosting. Vanda Anna was one of those selected. She had been in the home for just two years. Before that, she had been in an orphanage since the age of two. She came to the U.S.A. for the summer of 2009 and had a positive experience, but was not adopted.
    At the start of this year, we found Life Fellowship, which has an active and growing orphan ministry. It was here we found out about New Horizons for Children, (NHFC) a hosting ministry for children of Eastern Europe. We also met and got too know others in the church who had both hosted and then adopted, because of this ministry. 

    Unknown to us until recently, we discovered that God had been at work in an interesting way: in February, when the NHFC Summer Hosting Program was introduced to Lake Norman Baptist Church, the pastor’s wife at that church randomly picked up pictures of two orphans from a pile of hundreds of orphans. She committed to pray for these two orphan girls, since she and her husband would not be able to host an orphan this year. Those two girls turned out to be Vanda and Viktorija, both from Latvia: Vanda now to be adopted by us, and Viktorija to be adopted by our newly made friends this summer, Mike and Julie VanHoy of Lake Norman Baptist Church. Little did we know that God had woven our lives together back in February, and we would not meet until June 30th, the night the girls arrived from Latvia.Their blog is linked as a favorite of this blog.

    Starting in May, we began looking at the hundreds of pictures of orphans NHFC was actively seeking homes for the summer. It took some time and prayer, but both of us selected Vanda Anna as a child we wanted to host for the summer. After much anticipation and excitement on both sides, on June 26, 2010, Vanda Anna arrived to stay with us for 5 weeks. Each day we grew to love her more and more. By the second week, we were talking of adoption. By the third week, we were ready to commit. 

    We sent her back to Latvia on August 1, 2010. This was hard, but all of us hung on to the hope that we would soon be reunited. Since then, we have been in regular communication with Vanda since thanks to email, Skype and the telephone. Both Vanda and our family are very excited, and we wait for the day she can become part of our forever family.

   Since August 1st, we have been working to bring our girl here as soon as possible.  This whole journey has been about God’s amazing love, and His desire for us to share that love with others. His love is true sacrificial love, and through Jesus, he has shown us how to love others. We are adopted into His kingdom and He has called us to adopt Vanda into our home where the greatest gift we can offer our children is sharing the love of Christ in a way in which they too may accept the Father’s love and become adopted into the family of God.