Adoption News

In two weeks from now, my wife and I will be in some sort of confused state of what time is it as we find our way through international airports. China is a long ways from here, and it seems like it’s already taken forever to get here. We began a process to adopt a little girl about a year and a half ago. After mountains of paperwork, lots of prayer, and even some laughs along the way, it’s go time. Tickets are bought and money is flying around like it’s from a Monopoly game. We can’t wait.

I have to admit I’m not a real “keep up the adoption blog” type of guy. Though there are many of them out there with lots of great information, we haven’t done much publicly that details the ups and downs of this process. That said, since we’re at this point in the game and continually seem to have people who are interested in our story, I thought it was a good time to write a bit about adoption in general and our story in particular. We’ll start with the former.

One of the questions we are continually asked is why do you guys want to adopt?

It’s pretty simple and deeply rooted for us. We want to adopt because there is a little girl in China right now who was left on the side of the road when she was 6 days old. Ok, that’s just too emotional, right? Seriously though, we’re adopting because there are lots of kids who need a home (143 million orphans). We have 2 biological children and no reason to believe we could not have more. But having more children isn’t necessarily our motivation. James 1.26-27 gives us the marks of genuine Christianity. In a representative sort of way, James pulls the two most helpless groups and says a real believer serves the helpless — those unable to repay. Just as it was then, these 2 groups are the widows and orphans. I think a distinction is worth making here. James isn’t giving a command, he’s giving characteristics. The response to James 1 isn’t go care for an orphan or widow, the response is go check your heart if you don’t care for the marginalized and helpless of the world. Every Christian doesn’t have to adopt a kid to be obedient. But every Christian should have something inside of them that desires to serve the hopeless and helpless.

Adoption is a such a great picture of the gospel. God adopts us into his family despite our pedigree — not because of it. He took those who were his enemies and of another family, and He makes us fully functioning members of His royal family.

Another question we get asked is why China?

I wish I had a super-spiritual answer for you. The short answer is we want to. The longer answer is, well, I guess there’s not a longer answer. But, I can tell a story, how about that? It was almost 2 years ago now that I went to a meeting with Lifeline Children’s Services. Backing up even more, Mindy and I had discussed adoption off and on since we were first married. Though we never really settled the issue and had a ‘plan,’ this was certainly open for discussion. We attended a meeting while living in LA that introduced the Fos-to-Adopt program. We decided we would see if we could have biological children first and then revisit this issue. That’s what happened.

Back to 2 years ago. Our church was contacted by Lifeline to see if we’d consider having an information meeting. I got a website and started poking around to make sure these people weren’t looney. (They aren’t, at least most of them.) I wasn’t able to attend this meeting, but ended up going to another Lifeline meeting hosted at another church. We thought we’d go the domestic route when we finally got around to adopting. After attending this meeting, we became very open to the idea of international adoption. Lifeline had agreements with a few different countries.

Between the finances, in-country stay, and age of eligible children, we decided to look further into the China program. So we began the process and away we went.

I wish I could tell you some fantastic feel good story about why China, but really that’s it. We made a commitment to adopt from China early on and haven’t looked back since.

Plenty of people have also asked us, how did you get matched?

This part of the process is probably the most emotional, difficult, and strange. We decided to go the special needs route out of China because of the way special needs children are really desperately hopeless after being ‘labeled’ and also the wait is substantially shorter. Special needs can be a birthmark or a heart defect. All sorts of things can land a child on that list.

We were in the process of getting our Home-study completed and waddling through the rest of the paperwork when we receive word that we may have a referral soon. Basically there is a list of names released by China and the various agencies each get a portion. They take our file and ‘match’ it with a child eligible for adoption. Prior to referral there is a necessary and painful form called the “desired child form.” This is where you get to go through a checklist (literally) and indicate what you’d be willing to take. Everything from missing limbs, to severe handicaps, to cleft lips and palettes are on this list. I found this incredibly difficult and heart exposing.

I kept thinking about my two children and how I would gladly accept any health problem they have as being from the hand of God. We would walk through any and every trial with them. Yet here I am with a pen and seemingly arbitrarily deciding what we want in a child. It had to be done. Obviously there are no guarantees that other problems are not present or will not develop.

One day, really ‘out of the blue’ we get an email that has two pics of this adorable little girl. The first line says something about being found at 6 days old. I really didn’t have to read anymore. We had 48 hours from that point to give the answer on this referral. During this time we had medical opinions to get. She has something called hip dysplasia. As we learned this isn’t all too uncommon but if it hasn’t been properly treated while young, it may require surgery later. We do not know how severe this is right now.

As you’ve guessed by now, we accepted the first referral we received. Since then, it’s been an eternity of almost 9 months till we got our approval to go halfway around the world and find this little person who will be the newest Cagle.

More or our story later...