It’s one of those moments we will always remember as though yesterday . In the middle of a sermon, pretty much out of nowhere, the preacher suddenly said
Some of you have been thinking about adoption. God wants you to get on with it .”
Well we had been thinking and talking about that. In fact it was a subject that had come up on and off over the previous 15 or so years. It had always felt that it wasn’t quite the right time for one of us and additionally we weren’t sure how to fit this into our life circumstances given both of our jobs being highly challenging and intense. But at that point we realised that we needed a revolution in our thinking. Everything needed to revolve around this, not the other way round. So our journey into adoption began.
What has this got to do with Christmas and the Home For Christmas theme we are running with at church? Well, in Matthew 1 we are introduced to a man called Joseph. He is a righteous or godly man. He is about to get married and he discovers that he is getting something more than he bargained for. His fiance is pregnant and it’s not his child. He wants to call the marriage off. However, God sends his angel with a message, telling Joseph to stick with Mary.
Joseph becomes a dad, he receives a son into his family that isn’t his own offspring. We are not told much more about Joseph, in fact some think he had probably died before Jesus’ public ministry took off. What we do know is that he named Jesus and that he took responsibility for protecting this son from the danger of Herod, crucial fatherly things.
Joseph in effect adopts Jesus, a pointer to the way that God adopts us into his family offering unconditional and permanent love. He also provides an example for the part that adoption can play in our witness. And adoption is a whole church witness whether you are doing the adoption yourself or supporting others who are bringing little ones into their families.
Our adoption story started in earnest back in Autumn 2021. It was at the end of January, this year, 2025 that our two wonderful girls became our children.
I might go into detail about some of our experience along the way in a future post if that would be helpful. However here are the headlines.
- There was a year of preparation and assessment. This started with an online event run by Hone For Good introducing people to the adoption process. They helped link us with an adoption agency. The first two stages include lots of form filling, medical assessments and pulling together references going back through your whole adult life. This is followed by a series of meetings with a social worker.
- At the end of this stage, a panel meets to decide whether or not you should proceed. For us this was quite an emotional point for us as our panel met just 5 days after my mum had died and recently after Sarah’s dad’s passing.
- We took a four month break at this stage for bereavement but the next stage is about linking and matching. We began this around about Easter 2023. The big need at the moment is for people to adopt boys, sibling pairs, slightly older children, those with additional needs and children from ethnic minorities. As we were looking for siblings we were matched quickly. However for some prospective parents this can take a long time.
- We started a lengthy introductions process with our girls in the Autumn (sometimes this is compressed into a few weeks), in our case it took a few months if journeys to the foster carer for days out and in with video calls in between. Eventually we spent a whole two weeks staying in a hotel close by. Then the foster carer brought our girls up and they stayed locally, coming over to the house each day. Finally the day came for them to move in.
- The girls moved in with us in January 2024. We then had to get them placed in school and all the other things like doctors and dentists followed. There was more paperwork to complete before finally an application could be made for the court to make a final order and then in January this year, almost a year to the day when the girls moved in and three years from that first meeting with Home For Good, they were officially part of the family with a new surname and birth certificates.
Of course the journey hasn’t been completed. There is much track still ahead and I’m sure plenty of bumps along the way. Adopted children come with all of the usual challenges that children do but the added challenges of the traumas they faces in early life. Part of belonging to a church through this means that we know we are not alone even though no one else will know the details.
And they bring the usual joys and more besides too. One of the great joys for our children is introducing them to a wider and growing family that started with grandparents, aunties, uncles and cousins but grew to include extended family and church. On one occasion my youngest exclaimed “daddy, we have such a big family” before listing off everyone.
Greater joy still has been seeing them get to know God, to discover there is a heavenly father who loves them and Jesus who came down to Bethlehem at Christmas, making his home with us, an adopted child into a family from Nazareth so that we could be adopted into God’s family and find a home with him.
If maybe God is prompting you to think about adoption, a good starting point is the fantastic charity, Home For Good
Faithroots 