"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."
-James 1:27 (NIV) 1
-James 1:27 (NIV) 1
Hi ,my name is Jeff and my wife Kristina and I creating this blog to stir the hearts of Christians thinking about adopting.We are licensed to foster and adopt through our county. We have been on this journey for about 2 years now. We have had a total of four beautiful children in our home, Elijah 1 and Mathais 0 who are brothers and Julian 2 and Jalena 3 who are brother and sister.We are in the process of adopting Elijah and we picked his brother up from the hospital on Feb 11th.
It has been a God thing how everything has just lined up for us and how smooth the transitions have been. We want to encourage people not to be afraid of one of the biggest drawbacks to fostering to adopt: "What if I get really attached to them and then they have to leave and I'm heartbroken?" We truly believe in praying for the right children to enter our home and the wisdom to say yes or no to the initial phone call from placements. Also in our experience, God has really protected our hearts.For example, when we met Elijah last year, we instantly fell in love with him and also at the same time felt he would be our child. So, we prayed if this mom can really do it, let her be successful, but if not, let her just surrender him. So, we waited and prayed and attended meetings and exactly nine months from the day we met Elijah, the mom surrendered him in court! We felt that the timing was too amazing to be a coincidence...He was destined to be our son from the beginning!
With our second placement last spring, we never truly felt the same connection that we did with Elijah, like we got the sense that these kids wouldn't be ours permanently but would be with us for a season to help protect them, establish a sense of security and teach them all that we could and take care of their medical needs. So, this past week on the same day a year ago that we met Elijah, March 11th,this sibling group got to back to live with their mom. Surprisingly, it wasn't devastating, and we had lots of time to process our feelings beforehand. We hope and pray their mom is successful in parenting them.
On March 11th we celebrated having Elijah with us for 1 year, we call this "gotcha day".So we went out for Chicago style pizza at Pizza Papalis in downtown Toledo and had a blast. Elijah loves pretending to play guitar like dad ,so that was the gift we got for him and he loves it. Mathais is just a peaceful baby boy that loves to eat and sleep. We can already see his personality coming out. We believe these brothers have a strong calling and gifting on their lives. As we mentioned before, Julian and Jalena were reunified with their mother on March 11th. Crazy how the timng worked out perfectly. We surrendered them both to God, and we believe when you do foster to adopt you still have an impact on the children that go home. We have to believe their spirit's will remember the love of Jesus they received when they were in our home.
So, now our journey continues. We will be adopting Elijah next month and what a happy day that will be! We will love little Mathais like he's our own and also hope and pray the best thing for him too. We will enjoy watching Elijah cover his brother with kisses and help feed him. We will attend meetings for him and wait and pray. And we will keep all of you posted of more amazing things God will do in our lives and the lives of these children!
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