Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Step of Faith

"A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy dwelling, God sets the lonely in families..." Psalm 68:5-6

When Justin and I decided that we would like to become parents, things did not quite go as planned. We decided to be foster parents while we waited for God to give us a child. We knew there were many children who needed a loving home and we had one, so it just made since for us. We instantly fell in love with the sweet children who were placed in our home. I remember praying one day and telling God that I was completely o.k. if we were never able to have biological children. I thought we would adopt all of our children and that was fine with me. Little did I know that I was pregnant with Sawyer.
The Lord has blessed us with our two boys and we are so thankful to Him for this, but the desire to adopt has not gone away. I remember tucking Sawyer in bed when he was about 2 years old and listening to him thank God for every member of his extended family and for all of his friends. It struck me how awesome it was to have so many people who loved our children. We know full well that there are children who do not have that. There are an estimated 145 million orphans in our world today. These children go to bed each night without a list of people who love and care for them. These children have no one to call "mommy" or "daddy". These children whom God created in His image may never hear of His love.
Now that we are settled into our new home and the boys are not babies anymore, we have been talking about adding another child to our family. We feel that God is calling us to do this through international adoption. We went to an Adoption for Life conference in February that was just what we needed to motivate us to take the first step. For the last few weeks we have been talking to adoption agencies, home study agencies, and adoptive parents. We hope to apply very soon and get this process started. We don't really know when or how we will adopt, but we know God wants us to step out in faith and trust Him with the rest. We are going to start an adoption blog soon, so that our friends and family can follow our journey to baby Bufkin #3.

5 comments:

Brandi Hasley said...

What great news! Congratulations! We will be praying for the whole process to go smoothly and peacefully.

Amanda said...

Hey! This may be weird, but I've been following your blog through Robin Iles's blog (I'm her sister-in-law). I'm so excited for your family! God has also called us to adopt...we had a little girl 6 weeks ago, but we feel led that Iles child #3 will be from a Rwanda adoption. I'm looking forward to watching ya'll go through the process, because we'll be starting it in a year or so!

meredith said...

Thanks, Brandi! We truly appreciate the prayers.

Amanda, it is not weird at all. I have actually been on your blog too. We are pretty sure we are going to adopt from Rwanda as well. At this point we are just waiting to hear back from the agency we have chosen to do our home study and then we will apply with the adoption agency.

Amanda said...

Oh my goodness!! How wonderful if we both had children from Rwanda! What agency are you going through?

meredith said...

We are probably going to go with All God's Children International. They are based out of Oregon. If you want more information you can e-mail me.

meredithbufkin@yahoo.com