As we sat in church a few weeks ago watching a video from a trip our priest, Father James, took to his home town in Nigeria, a stirring started in both my husband and I. At the end of the video, a note said to call Father James for information on how to help the people of Nigeria or for information on adoption. Todd leaned over to me and whispered, "We should adopt." It's a miracle that an ambulance didn't need to be called as I was bowled over by this declaration.
We were happy. We had everything. We had the American dream and we didn't need to rock the boat by undertaking something this BIG. He had to know by putting it out there to....ME...that he had just stirred up the biggest grand daddiest's of all hornet's nests. My husband is a big idea guy. He's a big dreamer. I am all heart and this could be a prove to intersect with someone getting hurt but we got caught up in the excitement for the moment.
I will not leave you as orphans.
I will come to you.
John 14:18
So in the next few days we toyed with the idea until finally I called Father James and asked for him to return our call. We waited. And we waited. And we waited. Then I emailed him. And we waited some more.
When he finally called us back, he somewhat embarrassingly explained that the adoption that he they were speaking about in the video was an education sponsorship not an adoption. The definition of adoption vs sponsor was lost in translation as his first language is not English.
We spent a couple days feeling a little dumb but we quickly got over it knowing that there are still millions of children in Africa needing loving homes and that God may have used this to light a little fire within our hearts. Nigeria is not open to international adoption we found out but other countries in Africa had children living without hope, without loving families and without opportunity. We opened our hearts and we were listening and we were going where God sent us. And so started our journey to research where we would eventually go.....
