The Very Beginning

Last month was officially National Adoption Month. Last week we celebrated Grace's 6th Gotcha Day. And since I'm nothing if not a day late and a dollar short, I'm writing about all of this today. I've been ruminating on writing about my siblings' adoptions for some time now, so here it begins, here it happens.

And why not start at the beginning? (It is, after all, a very good place to start.)

Before I met B, I dated a guy with the same name for a little while. (My family still refers to him as the "Wrong B.") While not the right man for me, this guy did something of monumental importance in my life. In March of 2002, he took me to see Steven Curtis Chapman at The Fox in Atlanta. We had broken up a while before the concert, but I had always dreamed of seeing SCC, so I went. That night, SCC talked about the first little girl that he and his wife had adopted from China. And then he sang a song about her. There was not a dry eye in the place by the end. The strangest part in this was that I was prompted to start praying that my parents would adopt. What? Did I mention that this was a few weeks before my 20th birthday? My youngest sibling was 14 at the time.

So, for the next couple of weeks, I prayed, albeit half heartedly and with little belief that anything would come of it. I'll go ahead and say here, that I don't believe that I am the reason that my parents ultimately adopted. God used me to birth the idea in them, but more importantly, God used these events in my life to increase my faith. You see, Grace's adoption is the biggest miracle I've ever seen with my own two physical eyes.

I have decided that this story will be a series because there's so much to tell and so many details that I don't want to leave out.

"And like the rain that falls into the sea, in a moment what has been is lost in what will be."
-Steven Curtis Chapman