Photo by Abby Coyle Hyde
There’s no escaping the truth that adoption pulls and stretches you in a multitude of ways. For us, the pulling and stretching began four years ago, when we first started to pursue adoption. Despite the many ups and downs we experienced through our own adoption journey, we had a few saintly helpers to encourage us along the way. Having Julian of Norwich and Saints Joachim and Anne “nearby” helped us through all the bumps in our story, which brought us incredible comfort and relief.
After almost three years of unexplained infertility, my husband and I felt called to open our hearts to the idea of growing our family through adoption. Like many, perhaps, who enter into adoption, we were full of naïveté and expectations. I look back on those two younger versions of ourselves with such compassion. Coming into adoption through the cross of infertility meant our hearts were already bruised and vulnerable, yet we still had such hope and trust that God would make a way for us to be parents if that was truly His will.
As with every adoption story, ours is unique. We have always felt close to Julian of Norwich because of her famous phrase, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Knowing that adoption, while beautiful, has its own trials, we dedicated our adoption process to Julian of Norwich. In fact, we fundraised early on for our adoption by making t-shirts with the slogan “All shall be well” across the shirt. We received an icon of Julian of Norwich as a gift, and it brought us tremendous comfort throughout the process. Every time we looked at the icon, we were reminded that, indeed, all shall be well.
We went into the adoption process via a local, Christian agency. We had been referred to this agency through friends, and we felt confident that they would provide an ethical adoption experience for everyone involved. We went through all the paperwork and interviews and visits, and after countless delays (all out of our hands), we were finally approved on July 26, 2020. This date turned out to be the feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, and they became (and still are) close friends through the entire adoption process.
One of the hardest parts of adoption is the incessant unknown. As someone who prefers to know in advance and in chronological order what will happen, letting go of my expectations and desires and giving them to God was one of the hardest spiritual lessons I’ve learned to date.
One of the enduring lessons from this season for me is that God is ultimately in control of life. What I mean is that, no matter what we did or didn’t do to grow our family, the Lord is the one who gives life. This was an incredibly challenging yet freeing lesson to learn.
What a grace to eventually reach the understanding that children are not rewards bestowed upon those who are most worthy; any semblance of control a person has over their fertility is simply because the Lord allows it. He is ultimately the one in charge.
I learned this lesson eventually through many years of prayer and much crying out to God about our situation. However, even in the waiting and unknown, we were not left alone. Each year without a baby we renewed our hope and renewed our home study, and found out it was accepted on Saint Joachim and Saint Anne’s feast day, in which we found great solace.
Finally, after what was coming up on three years of active waiting, we decided to expand our options by working with an ethical adoption consultant.
Because our beloved local agency only completes in-state adoptions, we decided to expand our horizons, so to speak, and by working with the consultant, we could have our profile shown to birth parents all over the U.S. In preparation for this, we did a small fundraiser to help us offset the unexpected costs of working with the consultant.
Through this fundraiser, I was reconnected with a family friend, whose family member was looking to make an adoption plan! From there, what had been years of longing and waiting culminated in two quick and crazy months of preparation for baby and for travel.
Because of the timing, we didn’t have a chance to meet the birth parents, both of whom were involved with the adoption, before our baby was born. Our family friend essentially vouched for my husband and me and that was enough for the birth parents to go ahead and create an adoption plan with us as the adoptive parents. While we weren’t able to develop a relationship with the birth parents before our son was born, it is our desire and prayer that through our open adoption relationship, we can build enough trust that they remain in our son’s life to some degree. We have a shared photo album and text threads with the birth parents and hope that as our son gets older, depending on his desires, we can continue to build those relationships.
While connecting with our son through “self-matching” (meaning the birth family chose us to be the adoptive parents outside of an agency) brought its own set of trials, the beauty of the experience could only have been orchestrated by God Himself. When we met our son, all the trials and waiting made sense. It was so clear from the beginning that he is the child God wanted for us, and the time of waiting and unknown made us ready for what we were to be entrusted with.
In another God-designed detail, we received the notification that ICPC (the inter-state paperwork that ensures against child-trafficking) had cleared and we could go back home with our son on July 26, 2023 – three years to the date of when we had officially become an active waiting family. Saints Joachim and Anne came through for us in ways we could never have fathomed through all those years of waiting, desiring, and hoping.
It is our hope that our story of friendship with the saints provides hope in your own journey with fostering or adoption. Despite the many ups and downs we experienced through our own adoption journey, being able to look back and see how Saints Joachim and Anne, in particular, were interceding for us all along shows such intentionality and purpose for our story from our Heavenly Father.
Ultimately, God was writing our story in conjunction with our son’s, and because he hadn’t been born yet when we began our adoption journey, we had to undergo a lot of waiting and spiritual purification. I wouldn’t change anything about our journey, and as we contemplate and pray about growing our family once more through adoption, I know that our family size and any siblings for our son are all in the palm of God’s hand.
Merideth will celebrate seven years of marriage to her husband Andrew in October. They welcomed their beautiful son through adoption on July 21, 2023, and he remains their greatest and most treasured gift. Merideth writes from the heart in the heart of Oklahoma. You can find more of her writing at https://mannafromthesky.substack.com/.
