national adoption month part one: an ode to our adoption agency.

Hi there, friends!

This weekend was the three-year anniversary of the day that our adoption of Gabe and Noah was finalized in court.

Did you know that November is also National Adoption Month?

This gives me a double excuse to talk about adoption, which is one of my favorite things!

I’m going to write two blog posts this week, and this first one is about our adoption agency, Bethany Christian Services.

Since it’s been over four years since we started our process, I think it’s a good time to reflect on the agency we chose. I realize that there are many avenues to adoption, including through foster care, and many great, reputable adoption agencies. There are books and websites that can help you navigate choosing your own adoption path.

But I just want to talk today about our agency and our experience. Because I’m passionate about both!

So, Bethany.

It wasn’t a hard choice for us because friends have been adopting through Bethany our whole married life, and I knew of folks who’d adopted through this agency long before that. It was very helpful in those early stages of our process to have friends who had recently adopted and could answer our dozens of questions.

We loved watching their unique adoption stories unfold before our eyes. Seeing them trust God with this enormous leap of faith, and watching Him faithfully provide, gave us the courage to actually take the leap ourselves.

David and I had one big, burning question of the agency as we began, and that was “How are birth mothers treated?”

Because from the beginning we both felt ourselves called, not just to a baby, but to a birth mom.  And we knew that if at all possible, we wanted an open adoption — which means having ongoing communication with the birth mom or dad. We couldn’t explain exactly why. It was just really important to us.

In retrospect, I believe God was preparing our hearts for Christi, and that thought fills me up with happiness.

And so as we went to our information meeting and began to ask questions of Bethany, we were encouraged to hear the process that they take with birth parents, and the way they encourage all adoptive families to have some level of openness (this can involve anything from exchanging photos and email updates to actual visits).

As an agency, they believe it’s best for the child, best for the birth parents, and best for the adoptive family. We loved hearing that they make themselves available as a resource to birth mothers for life. As we learned all of this, we were convinced that Bethany was the right fit for our family.

After we turned in our official adoption application, we were assigned a social worker, or adoption specialist. Her name is Tricia, and I’ll be honest: I was terrified of her. Actually I’d met her already at a church that supported our church plant, and she was nothing but nice and friendly. But I was terrified of her position and the power she held over what seemed like my entire destiny.

Adoption is nothing if not an intensely scary, vulnerable thing.

You’re allowing yourself to be assessed for your fitness as parents. Now, this doesn’t exactly have to happen when you give birth to a biological child. But when you adopt a child, suddenly somebody is going to show up at your house and poke around and ask you dozens of personal questions and then give their opinion as to your ability to parent an adopted child. This is hard. You’re opening yourself up to rejection on all sorts of levels.

But my friends assured me, “You’ll love Tricia! The moment she comes in your house and you start chatting, you’ll feel at ease. We always look forward to her visits.”

And they were right!

We did love Tricia. She’s been doing her job for 20 years and is very good at it. Something I appreciate about her is that I feel like she cares about David and me as real people, not just adoptive parents. She’s  genuinely interested in our life and ministry and kids. She makes us feel seen and heard and special.

Still, we were relieved and delighted to have the home study and interview process over, and get our acceptance letter as adoptive parents with Bethany. At this point we officially became a waiting family.

Adoption agencies help you navigate an overwhelming process that involves many, many necessary details. Details you’ve never even thought about. We were so thankful to simply be given the next tasks to do, one step at a time. We were also thankful for our agency when it came time to wait for a referral, which is another scary, vulnerable process.

Now that you’ve been vetted and approved by an agency, you must be chosen by a birth mother, which can feel like the strangest popularity contest of all time. Your entire life has been condensed into a brief paragraph and a couple of photos posted on the Bethany website, and a cute little Shutterfly photo book that’s shown to expectant parents.

Tricia let us know that she wouldn’t be in touch much through this “waiting” part of the process, but we could contact her any time with questions.

Fast forward six months.

Waiting was excruciating for me. I believed in God’s Sovereignty over our process with all my heart, but somehow my emotions couldn’t catch up. I cried most days of those six months. I think it was both my longing for a child but also the weight of the knowledge that whoever God gave us would change our family forever. And there was no way to know when the change would happen or what it would look like.

I’m not by nature a patient person at all. I’m not a wait-er. God has taught me so very much through every part of our adoption story, but the most important thing is to be willing to wait on Him. To wait in the dark.

Tricia texted to check in after six months or so, and I simply said, “I’m struggling. This is hard.”

She immediately asked, “Do you want to get together for coffee?”

Our adoption specialist! Offered to hang out and get coffee to see how I was doing with my waiting!

It was such a personal, kind gift from God.

I met her at Starbucks in the Vista and I vividly remember sitting together and sipping lattes at our little window table. I remember telling her the waiting was so much more difficult than I expected, but feeling like I didn’t deserve for it to be this hard because I have two amazing children already. She was kind and compassionate and didn’t make me feel silly or ungrateful.

I had something else to tell her though.

I said, “So we just received got that email about the two little boys who are available for adoption. David responded and said we were interested. I haven’t slept ever since.

What do you think? You know us. Is this absolutely crazy?”

I expected her to say, “Yes! This is crazy, Julie! You have a very busy life and a church plant and two kids already. It’s too much.”

But Tricia didn’t say that. She said, “I don’t know much information yet, but I think this could be a great fit for you guys. And you know what? God knows what’s best for these boys and what’s best for your family. Just take the next step. There are a hundred ways He can close the door if this isn’t His will.”

Those words were all I needed to hear. I needed someone to believe in us, but more than that, to believe in God’s power and faithful love on our behalf, and on behalf of two faceless brothers who had already burrowed their way into my heart.

I’ll never, ever forget the power of that conversation to fill my heart with courage and peace as we took another leap.

She was right. God could have closed the door any number of times, but to our astonishment, He threw it wide open.

Tricia has been with us in some of the most vulnerable moments.

A week after that conversation, she showed up at our house with a folder of information about those same boys to give us details before we made the decision to have our profile shown to their birth mom. It was a unique situation because it wasn’t a baby. And it was siblings. And their birth mom had specifically requested an open adoption that included visits.

Bethany was doing everything they could to protect this young woman by only showing her the profile of a family who definitely wanted to pursue adopting the boys. And it appeared that we were that family.

Tricia was the first person who told us our sons’ names and she sat with us as I cried, because that was the moment I knew. She told us about their mom, and I immediately loved her in my heart. I cried more for her pain and the decision she was making, and I begged the Lord to bring hope to all of us in this seemingly impossible situation.

Tricia called us later that week to tell us that Christi looked at our family photo book and loved it and wanted to meet us. She then emailed us the first photos we ever saw of our boys.

And she was with us that cool, overcast April day when we first met Gabe and Noah in the Greenville Barnes and Noble parking lot.

I believe that our God is a God who puts children into families, and He uses so many means to do that. But for us, in our story, He used Bethany Christian Services and he used Tricia. Our adoption would not be what it is without them.

We were so touched by the way Bethany helped us navigate the entire process.

Our boys’ birth mom, Christi, had her own adoption specialist through the Bethany office in Greenville, and we had ours. Both women worked together to help the transition be as smooth as humanly possible for Christi and us and Gabe and Noah. They gave us all the exact words to say to one another, to the boys, and to our biological kids. They helped us spend a week meeting Gabe and Noah in parks and book stores and Monkey Joe’s so that they could become familiar with us before we signed papers and they moved into our home forever.

They helped figure out the first visits right after the placement, when all of us involved were in trauma, plain and simple.

We loved the idea of open adoption but had no idea how to do it, and so we needed help learning how to be a family with Christi.  We’ve grown into our relationship over time, as trust and communication has grown, and I’m endlessly thankful to Tricia for all her wisdom and input into the process.

We now enjoy friendship with our boys’ birth family because we had her consistent, wise support and help.

Tricia has texted with me and emailed and talked on the phone and visited many times in the last three years. Even now, she’s the only person I can ask certain questions because she’s the one person who was there with us for the beginning of our adoption story and knows everyone involved.

I am endlessly grateful for her.

I’m grateful for the resources Bethany stills offers us, like virtual training classes that deal with issues like attachment, interracial adoption, and special needs. I’m grateful for the books I had to read as apart of our adoption training, because I’ve needed them.

I read every single article in Bethany’s Lifeline magazine when it arrives in our mailbox, because I feel so encouraged by the honest and hopeful stories of other people, and in seeing the diverse issues the agency is willing to tackle, like foster care and giving voice to adult adoptees. I pray over the photos of children who are still waiting for families.

It’s been three and a half years since Gabe and Noah became part of our family, and I sat with Tricia at Indah Coffee last month to catch up and ask parenting questions. She wanted to hear all about our life, how we’re doing, how the church doing is five years in, what the kids are up to. She had insight into some of the parenting challenges we’re facing.

And so naturally, she was one of the first people I wanted to tell a new secret dream: that I feel like there may be room in my heart for somebody else.

Not any time soon. But when our youngest, Noah, is in high school, maybe, or even when he graduates, David and I have begun to talk about adopting someone who’s ageing out of foster care.

It feels like a very long time away, and yet it seems from my view right now that three and a half years flew by in a breath. I can wait. I need to wait, because there are other things God has for me in the here and now. So this is a treasure I’m content to simply tuck away in my heart, with open hands.

God has brought things into my life like adoption to teach me a waiting life.

He’s also using hard things to make me strong on the inside as I learn what surrender means, what it is to really depend on Him for everything and let Him write my story.

And in the process He’s filling me up with so much joy that I want to give more love away. He’s showing me that freedom and happiness is found in laying down my life and serving others. So I can trust Him for big things now, and big things in the future, like maybe, one day, adopting a teenager.

And as I shared this, once again, Tricia didn’t say, “That’s crazy!”

She just said, “Julie, I think that would be wonderful. If you do it, that child is alive right now. So you can start praying for them.”

Tricia is not a doubter. Because of her faith in God, she speaks bold, hopeful words to people. Words of life.

I want to be like her.

My experience with Bethany has given me so many gifts.

I have two of my four children. I have their birth family. I have more faith in our beautiful, majestic God, who has used trials and healing to shape and grow us all in ways we never imagined, and has given us an adoption story that only He could write. I have a passion for serving and encouraging others who adopt. And I’m inspired to dream big dreams for our future, even to consider the possibility of adopting again.

For me, National Adoption Month is a month of gratitude.