How we chose our agency and country

The decision to adopt came quickly for us. God knew his divine plan for us but the opportunity came suddenly for us, and we were not expecting the opportunity to come in the way, and at the time that it did. Don't hear me wrong, we are really excited about the opportunity to adopt but the way that it came about was just a shock.

We had not really done any research on adoption agencies before this point. We made the decision to start the adoption process and then we had to decide what agency we were going to use. Some people know the country that they want to adopt from and they chose their agency based on the country that they want to adopt from. We had no idea where we wanted to adopt from. We decided that we wanted to approach all the decisions about the adoption prayerfully. We made the decision that we wanted to chose an agency that we trusted. We put a lot of time and prayer into the decision of what agency to use, we talked to friends of ours that had adopted to see what agencies they used and the experience that they had with those agencies.

After a lot of research and prayer we decided to use Lifeline Children's Services in Birmingham, AL. Once we chose an agency we started praying through all the countries that were available for us to adopt from through Lifeline, including both international and domestic adoption. We both felt very clearly that God was leading us to adopt internationally at this time. We are not ruling out domestic adoption for the future but we just felt very clearly about the decision to adopt internationally right now.

Lifeline had a list of countries that you can adopt from through their agency. We started praying about each one of those countries and looking at the requirements to adopt from those countries. Each country has it's own requirements for adoption in that country. When we read the requirements for Uganda, Africa we fit each requirement. As we read about Uganda and prayed about adopting from Uganda, we were both filled with such peace. We knew right then that we were supposed to adopt a baby from Uganda. The age range for our adoption is 3 months old to 2 years old. So, our baby will fall in that age range somewhere.

We sent in our application to Lifeline and a few days later we got our acceptance letter via email. Matt and I had run an errand to TJ Maxx and we were standing in the checkout line, when we got the email. Matt read it to me as we were waiting in line and we had our own public moment of rejoicing and praising God for His blessings. We were able to pay for our items and get out to the car before I lost it. I just sat in the car and cried because I was so happy.

I told Matt, "This has got to be what it is like to find out your pregnant. I don't even know this child, I don't know if they are a boy or a girl, I don't know what their personality is like, I don't know anything about this person, but I'm already in love with this child!" We know that God already has a child picked out for us and we know that one day soon we will get to meet this child.

Sorry this post is so long, but I am trying hard to get our blog up to date. Thanks for bearing with me as I'm trying to explain our thought process and decisions that we have made up to this point. God has bless us so much through this whole process and we want to be able to share that with others, so that they can see how good God is.