Our vanilla family is adding a dash of chocolate. |
We’re expecting!!!!
(I feel like this needs a lot of exclamation points.) This may or may not come as a big surprise to you, but Mike and I are officially “paper pregnant”. I know I have been talking about adoption, orphans, and even how we’ve been part of an adoption small group for a long time, but until very recently we had no plans for us to bring any more kids into the Hubbell clan. We thought we were done. We were content to support our adopting friends and maybe someday go on short term missions trips to care for orphans.
So obviously things have changed and now we are making space in our hearts, lives and family for another child, a little girl born in Haiti. We have been praying about this for a very long time and we heard a crystal clear call from Lord to do this. Mike and I are not the same people we were just a couple years ago, God has totally transformed our hearts. We have become intensely aware that the gospel means we were once orphans ourselves, and the Father adopted us into His family to make us His children. So we want to live that out in gratitude.
Plus we’re ready to be parents again. Our kids are the greatest gifts we’ve ever been given and we want more of that. We love being parents. We’re ready to tackle the hard stuff and embrace the beautiful stuff to give an abandoned baby a forever family. And why not add a little estrogen to the mix? The boys love the idea of having a little sister. They pray for her all the time now and imagine life with her.
I’ll share more in the coming days about the miraculous power of prayer through all this. It really is nothing short of supernatural.
So after lots of research into both domestic and international adoption and lots of agencies and country programs, we knew the Lord was calling us to Haiti. Adoptions there were closed after the 2010 earthquake and are now reopened but it is pretty restrictive, chaotic and risky right now. We meet their narrow requirements (at least 35 yrs old, married 10+ years, only 2 bio kids) and have been given the faith to face the big unknowns. It feels so weird to us, being engineers and not at all risk takers, to be not choosing a “safer” route, but it was clear to us that all adoptions carry big risk. In fact really, all parenting does. The fact is though that the need for adoptive families is so massive in Haiti that we felt God calling us to lead the way for others. Hopefully we can show the way and help other families coming behind us.
I’ll write more about Haiti and about how we chose our agency, America World Adoption, in future posts. For now I hope that you will join us in celebration and in prayer. We’re gonna need a whole lot of prayer to see this through for a long time.
That’s our big BIG HUGE news! That’s why my heart is in Haiti…literally. Somewhere in an orphanage is my daughter, my heart, waiting for us. I can’t wait to bring you along on this adventure with us.