A follow up to this post:
I have struggled for three years with the idea of adoption. Jeff and I knew about my infertility prior to getting married. I learned about it myself at nineteen, when a doctor found a tumor the size of a softball in my 90 pound body.
I thought "I will adopt children" and I was fine with that. Until I got married and discovered that I did not want to adopt. I wanted to have a baby with Jeff, one that looked like him and wrinkled their nose at me the way he does. Later, I would learn more about my infertility. Not that I couldn't get pregnant. But that I couldn't stay pregnant. I am not sure which was more heartbreaking.
And people would say "You can always adopt" and I would hate them for it because no I couldn't. I couldn't just adopt. It would be wrong for me in the mindset I was in. I would need to believe I was supposed to adopt. I would need to love that child in advance. I would need to know that was right for me, for us, for that child. And it wasn't.
I was listening to the bible on CD in my car. It's a corny version with terrible sound effects and an actor who overly dramatizes the voice of Jesus. I will admit that I was tuning it out when I heard "Pure and lasting religion in the sight of God our Father means that we must care for orphans" and I turned off the sound and was overwhelmed by the simplicity of it.
To care for orphans. Later that week an earthquake would destroy Haiti and I would find myself weeping at the news coverage, touching the screen when they showed the children who had lost their parents. The orphans. The following week I would visit a friends blog to see this link, a story about a girl who lives in Uganda. Caring for the orphans. I would go to the local mom and pop restaurant to pick up breakfast and an old man would hand me a slip of paper and ask me if I'd like to donate. "We send supplies, he told me, to a foreign orphanage." And then I would wake up my husband to whisper to him a dream I had of a woman handing me a baby who was not mine and yet she was.
I do not know if we will adopt. At this time we don't even have the means to adopt. But I do know that I am changed in my heart and open to the idea. And I also know that regardless of whether I bear a child or not, I am supposed to be doing something, at this moment, to care for the orphans.
