The Wal-Mart Baby: Prologue

With the recent victory won in our journey with Summer, it appears that our dream of adoption is going to come true. However, I realized that, even though this has been the biggest, most visible miracle of God in our life to date, I have not shared the details with too many people. Partially as a defense mechanism to protect my heart from becoming too excited, and partially because the story is so bizarre, it is very hard to casually tell someone bits and pieces of the story. But now I want everyone to rejoice with us, having the full knowledge of the events that took place so that God may be glorified because His hand was evident in every move. And it's quite a remarkable story.

So with that said, I want to take the opportunity to relay, over the next several posts, the miraculous story of our "Wal-Mart Baby".

Prologue:

Our desire to adopt a baby officially began back in 2004, before Jubilee was even conceived. We had always felt that a Christian family should adopt an orphan if possible because God encourages us in the Bible to care for orphans and we are all adopted into the family of God when we become Christian's so it was a natural choice for us to make. Besides, after having 2 boys and not wanting to risk having a third male child, we decided we really should adopt a baby girl before things got out of hand. We researched all three types of adoption: Foreign, Domestic and County and we were pretty certain that we wanted to pursue a foreign adoption because it was the most guaranteed. Domestic and County adoptions were very risky, and you could potentially invested a lot of time and emotions into a child that could be taken away any time at the whim of the biological parents. Foreign adoption was more expensive but it was a done deal when it was all finalized. We spent several months researching many different foreign adoption companies and deciding on the country we wanted to adopt from. While researching the prices and programs, we discovered that we were too young to adopt from most countries, China said you had to be 35 to adopt, and so Russia or the Ukraine was our only country options, to the tune of $65 to $85 thousand dollars. This figure did not phase us to much because we knew it was a several year process and we would have opportunities to save money, fund raise, or apply for loans and grants specifically set up for adoptions. We were excited to get started and we began preparing our application, but whenever we got ready to pay the $200 application fee to set things in official motion, something always held us back. I just didn't feel confidant that we were making the right choice. I knew God was able to provide the finances, but I was afraid we would get half way through the process and not be able to finish. Because money was a huge factor, we began looking at the option of San Bernardino County foster-adoption which was free, but we were told that young baby girls were impossible to request, and it would be about a 5 year wait for a baby or toddler, that did not have severe problems. We decided, however, to begin the process anyways and it could at least be working in the background while we decided which type of adoption we were going to officially commit our self to. We applied with a local agency called Olive Crest. After a preliminary screening, they determined  that Sean and I would have to attend 6 months of marital counseling to ensure that we were a committed couple. We were allowed to do 3 months of Christian counseling but the other 3 months had to be with a clinical psychologist. We reluctantly agreed and we did benefit greatly from the Christian counseling but the other psychologist was huge waste of time and money. Once we finished the 6 months of counseling, we reapplied to Olive Crest but after further consideration, they denied our adoption paperwork again.  Heartbroken and bewildered, we decided to try another agency in April of 2005 but we soon discovered that we were going to have another baby. Not wanting to be a mother of 4, we put aside our dream of adopting and focused on welcoming our baby girl, Jubilee into our lives. We were delighted that we had our 2 boys and my long awaited darling girl, and so our family of 5 was complete. We thanked God for prevented us from starting the foreign adoption process and we felt that we understood now why we were denied through Olive Crest. We agreed that God must have known we were going to be having a baby girl. Little did we know that God did know Jubilee was on her way but He also had other plans for us later on down the road.