WHY TAIWAN?

I had someone ask me why we decided to adopt from Taiwan, so I thought I would share or story with everyone on the blog. It is a story of love and well guided direction from God. I hope this will encourage someone and maybe even prick someone's heart to think of adoption themselves.

Why Taiwan? Because that is where God led us. We adopted our now 4 year old daughter Olivia from China. When we found out in 2001 that I could not get pregnant, we started looking into adoption. We talked to a lot of people who had adopted, both domestically here in the U.S. and internationally. We asked God to lead us where He wanted us to go. We knew that God knew where our child was. We were open to wherever He wanted to send us. In 2003, we moved to Hattiesburg, MS and met some familes who had adopted from China. The light came on! That was where God wanted us to go. We spent time with these families and got informations on adoption agencies and on the country of China. We signed with an agency in March of 2004. We received the call about Olivia on January 7, 2005 and traveled to China to bring her home in March of 2005. She was 11 months old. We know that it was God's will for us to adopt a child from China. We can't imagine our life without Olivia. We we started feeling God calling us to adopt again, we of course thought of China first. We felt it was important for Olivia and a sibling to have that heritage connections. At that time though, China was imposing new restrictions on who could adopt from there and we did not qualify at the time. Our net worth wasn't high enough. It was also taking 4 times as long to adopt a child from China as it did when we adopted Olivia. It only took us one year with Olivia, it is now taking 4 years. Since the door of China were closed to us, we started praying about where God would have us to go. We then met online through an adoption yahoo group, a woman who had adopted a little boy from Taiwan. We talked with her extensively and did a lot of research on the country of Taiwan. We thought this would be a great match because we were wanting to adopt another Asian child so that our children would have that connection. This lady that we met told us about some American missionaries who started a children's home in Taiwan. They have been there working with children and preaching the gospel for 40 years. They help children in their care that are available for adoption to find loving homes in America, so we felt God leading us to contact them about possibly adopting a baby through them. Many of the people in Taiwan and China are very poor. Abortion is also at a very high rate. These missionaries minister to women and through the love of Christ show them that there is another way besides abortion. They also find homes for children who's parents are just so poor that they can't take care of their children. That is what happened with Isaac. His mother is unwed and very poor. She brought him to the missionaries when he was 2 1/2 asking for their help in finding a better home for him where he could get the care he needed and the opportunities that she could not offer. Talk about sacrificial love. Can you imagine what she must have gone through after trying to care for her child coming to the realization that she could not care for him anymore and decided that for him she must give him up. The missionaries prayed about what family God had chosen for this little boy and God lead them to us. This really was God working because we had actually asked for a child under 12 months old, but the missionaries felt very strongly that God was telling them that He had chosen our family for this precious little boy. We know that this is God's will for our life. He even looks a lot like Olivia. After we had committed to God that we would adopt from Taiwan and was well on our way to completing the necessary paperwork like a home study and immigration paperwork, the doors to China were opened back up to us. That just proved to us that God closed to door to China at that time for us because it was not in His will for us to go back there. We believe very strongly in the power of pray and the power of God's hand on our lives on a daily basis. He is interested and involved in every aspect of a person's life if they will let Him. That is what we want for our family. We want God to be the head, the leader, and the guide of everything our family does. Our only goal is to follow the will of God. I will admit that it has not been easy all of the time. There have been many disappointments and setback with this adoption, but I have seen God's hand on it every step of the way. Even when things seemed impossible, God was still there. Coming out of the impossible only gave more confirmation that this was God's will. We will continue on following His lead and trusting that He will carry us through every step to our son.