The day adopting became a reality in our lives.

We have been blessed with a beautiful, wonderful family! But we realized, not too long ago, that our family is not yet complete....

Our journey into the world of adoption began on Sunday, February 28, 2010. We were at a friend's house, when, sort of out of the blue, this friend asked if we knew about "Summer Hosting Programs", where organizations bring over orphans from Ukraine to spend 3 weeks here in the US. I did not know about the program, nor was I very interested in it. But she said she would send the link so I could check it out.

The next day, upon receiving the link to a place called Red Line United, which was organizing this Hosting program, I thought I would be a good friend, and at least look at it. I opened up the site, clicked on the "view orphans" link, and, immediately our lives changed!

It's hard to put into words what happened at that moment, except to say that God opened my eyes to the fact that one of these children was supposed to join our family. Now, orphans have always tugged at my heart strings, but NOTHING like this has ever happened before! I remember crying...crying for these children, ages 8-16, who were stuck in an orphanage, without parents; crying for the hope that we were supposed to have a hand in rescuing at least one of them; and crying that the Good Lord was nudging us...US!...to have a hand in doing this good and worthwhile thing!

I got up from the computer, went to my husband, and asked if he would ever consider adopting an older child from Ukraine. Amazingly, he said, "maybe!". That almost blew me over, because every other time in the past I had asked anything about adoption, he had said , "no". But "maybe" was a word full of hope! He said for me to keep researching everything, and get back to him on what I found. So that is exactly what I did.

The next day I had much more information than I had had the day before, so I shared what I was learning with my husband. Afterwards, he was still interested, so I had to look him straight in the eye and say, "I need for you to be completely honest with me on this. If you are wanting me to continue to dig deeper into this idea of adoption just because you think it will make me happy, I need you to tell me to stop. You see, I need to know what YOU think about us adopting! If it truly is something you would like to pursue, then, GREAT, we'll keep going. But if you are going along with this just to appease me, then we need to stop. If we choose to do this, then it will HAVE to be something that we decide to do together, for it is going to permanently change our family". Amazingly, without hesitation, he said that given all that he knows now about these children, he cannot NOT adopt! If he turned his back on what God was calling us to do, then he knew we would regret it for the rest of our lives. So, the green light was on!