Harts in Durham

Corey and I were both certain that adoption was in our future, and even though we weren’t married yet, we wer having a lot of conversations about what our family might look like one day. While we were dating, we started attending a small group with several other couples, most of whom were married. One couple in particular was in the process of adopting–from Uganda. Every week while we were together they would share with us where they were in the process, what had happened in the last week and ask us for prayer. Because they desperately needed it. Their process was so crazy, there were constant threats that seemed like they would thwart the entire thing, and it all just seemed so unrealistically hard. I watched this unfold week after week and I thought, “Nope, this is not for me. I will NEVER EVER do this. I am definitely not strong enough to handle Ugandan adoption.” Ha!

You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

Our friends did end up adopting, they brought home two beautiful little boys, and while they were there they met a very sweet little girl. And her story stuck with them. They came home talking about her, asked us to pray for her, and for them as they considered the possibility of adopting her. And I’m not going to lie, it seemed crazy! They had just gotten off a roller coaster of a ride and they were willing to go back for more?! But they knew this little girl needed a family. And they were willing to step up and be that for her. To read about this in my BFF’s words, take a look at her blog post from that time. So they started the adoption process again, except this time the wheels just completely fell off. Basically, without doing something that would have looked shady at best, there was no way for our friends to bring her home. They were heartbroken. We were heartbroken! We had become very close with this family and invested in this girl’s story, we just couldn’t imagine why God would have taken her opportunity for a loving family away from her. Julie wrote another blog post, and we all continued to pray that God would provide a family for this child.

This all happened around the same time we started talking about adoption (much to my surprise–see here for more explanation). The director of the baby home in Uganda that our friends adopted told them about another little girl that was living there that needed a family. Our friends passed this information on to us, and still, all I could think of was how hard a Ugandan adoption would be. So we were kind of like, “ok, thanks, but no way” even though I think our minds kept coming back to this sweet little three-year-old in Uganda.

During this time we were also trying to buy this train wreck of a house in Durham. If you know Corey and me you know we’ve always wanted to renovate a house, and that we’ve always wanted to live on land. This house provided an opportunity for both, but it really was a total dump. We needed a specific type of mortgage to be able to renovate the house and make it our dream home. And wouldn’t you know it, the day we went to get approved for a mortgage, the house went off the market. It wasn’t sold to someone else, the seller just pulled it off the market. Strange. And then the craziest thing happened. The more we prayed about our house search, the more we felt God asking us to pursue adoption before we had the perfect house to bring a child into. That His plan is not for children to live in a beautiful home with a family, but for children to have the unconditional love of a family. So we decided to pull the trigger. Even though it was scary and nothing was guaranteed. We knew that it was time to lay aside our five-year plan and follow God’s plan for us.