I don’t know when the love for adoption started. I feel like it was always a part of me. I remember walking by signs for a fundraiser to help my High School Pastor adopt their second daughter and thinking “that is what I am going to do”.

I always loved adoption and knew that it wasn’t just another way to grow your family. I knew you were talking care of another mother’s baby because she was brave and choose to give her baby a chance at a life she didn’t think she could provide. I learned that adoption was a way of fighting abortion. I learned that these women who carried these children sacrificed so much. I had and have a great respect for adoption and birth mothers.

Again, I don’t remember when I learned that adoption was a part of what it meant to follow Christ. I do remember learning that every Christian is called to care for the orphan, the widow, and the needy. I viewed God’s command to care for the orphan very highly. In high school I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fight against abortion, and sex slavery. Learning that fighting for human rights meant fighting for an unborn life, the enslaved life, the mother’s life.

I read Orphanology: Awakening to Gospel-Centered Adoption and Orphan Care by Tony Merida and felt like I was being spoken to personally. Someone had finally sat down and written a how-to, why-to, what-to on orphan care. Orphan care isn’t just adoption. Adoption didn’t just have to be what you did when you couldn’t have children. Orphan care can be opening your home to kids who only have one parent. It can be sending more to sponsor a child overseas. It can be teaching a boy who doesn’t live with his dad how to change a tire or treat a woman respectfully. It can be helping raise money for a couple trying to adopt. It can be taking care of a foster care child for a little bit while their parent’s figure out how they can parent well. The opportunities are endless.

Orphan care has been a priority to me for as long as I can remember. As I have grown in the Lord and learned more I have come to see that it can fit into my life no matter the season I am in. The love and desire to adopt has never faded in me, it has changed over the years but I always wanted it to be a part of my story. I just never imagined that this is how my story would go. Thanks be to a God who is bigger than my plans, imagination, and desires.

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

– James 1:27