Eight years ago, when I first brought up the subject of adoption with Adel, he responded with the equivalent of a father pacifying the whimsey of his imaginative daughter, nowhere near the thought that it would one day come to pass, something like, “Sure, honey, adoption is great.”
Six years ago, when we watched a short video clip on adoption in church that had me all revved up and ready to go, Adel responded with a slightly more engaged response, something like, “Adoption is something I can see us doing at some point in our lives.”
Three years ago, when we attended Focus on the Family’s Wait No More conference in Dallas, Adel responded with much more conviction than I had ever heard from him on the subject of adoption. God had spoken to him through the presenters and his response was something like, “Yes, I believe we will adopt at some point.” And he gave me permission to submit the interest form, just to learn more. But since that conference was in Dallas and we live in Houston, it never progressed.
Two months ago, when Adel was in Honduras on a mission trip and I was getting ready to attend Focus on the Family’s Wait No More conference in Houston, Adel and I had a conversation quite different from any other. His mission team had been talking about the sponsorship of Honduran children in the mission school program. Adel had called me to ask my thoughts on it. In the end, we both agreed that while sponsorship was a good thing, and something we are in full support of, we both feel strongly that adoption is what we are being called into right now and we need to focus all our resources on that. His response was something like, “I believe God is calling us into adoption and the time is now to put our faith in action.”
Eight years ago, I never would have thought it would have taken this long to get to the point of actually adopting. Eight years ago, Adel never would have thought we would actually adopt. We have had many conversations on the subject in those eight years, usually consisting of me taking his pulse on the subject. It has been really amazing to see, without any effort on my part, God transforming Adel’s heart into His own.
After all, God is the ultimate Father, who has adopted all believers into His family through our faith in His grace:
Ephesians 1:3-6
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
Lord, I am so thankful for my husband, the godly man that you have created in him, that his heart so resembles yours in his love for the lost children of this world. I pray that you help him keep his eyes on you as he leads our family through the adoption process and as he becomes a father to the fatherless. I pray that you would give him wisdom as he learns to be a father to new children and that you would give him patience as our family is turned upside down in the process. Amen.
