Many of you will remember the McCaslin family. It’s hard to believe that almost one year ago they traveled overseas to bring home two teenage girls who were mere days away from becoming too old to be adopted.
Today, as one young man sits in a foreign orphanage with just days left to be chosen by a family, I knew that Diane would be the perfect person to join me in crying out for NOAH. Why?
Because she knows.
She understands.
She has journeyed the road of older child adoption–trusting the ONE who is able.
She has stepped out of her comfort zone and embraced children who are from hard places.
And because this mom knows the pain of a young person who desperately wants a family.
Thank you, Diane, for being willing to join your voice with mine and countless others as we cry out for one young man who matters!
You can follow their family journey here. Diane shares her family in such a beautiful way. I know you will be blessed by their unfolding story.
Deep within all of us is the yearning to be loved, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to belong, to be accepted as we are, to be valuable, to be needed.
And deep within precious Noah, lies a gaping hole and a craving for something so basic that most of us never give it much thought, and yet something far too many children live their lives never knowing, the love and permanence of a family.
It somehow seems fitting that Adéye would ask me to share my heart on older child adoption now as we celebrate the one year anniversary of our girls coming home. They were merely days from aging out of China’s adoption program when we arrived in China to take them home forever. They were lonely, scared, orphaned children with significant special needs that had kept them from ever being chosen. Yet their biggest need was to be loved.
Today Eliza and Evangeline aren’t orphans anymore. They are daughters, and granddaughters, and sisters, and nieces. They are loved. Today they belong, and our lives as well as theirs have been forever changed.
They have received the medical care they so desperately needed. They are learning to trust and to believe that we will always be here for them, but we are the ones who have been so richly blessed by their presence in our lives.
We are better for having chosen to love them.
Our family is richer because the girls are here.
Our biological children are blessed, not only to have two new sisters, but to have walked this path with us. They have learned to give and to love in a deeper way than they had known before.
We’ve all had the amazing privilege of seeing God move every single mountain that stood in the way of the girl’s adoptions. We’ve learned to trust Him in a bigger way than we had before.
We’ve learned that older children have something very special to give a family that babies do not, and that there is a commonality to the feelings we share. We’ve learned that time and experience bind us together in a way we hadn’t understood before, and we are blessed by the diversity our older girls have brought to our family.
So many of us are afraid to adopt older children. We fear so many things. We like to plan. We think we should choose what our family looks like. We consider birth order and timing and money. We worry about bonding and about our ability to parent an older child. We look with our limited scope, and we limit the blessings God would choose to bestow on us, all because we can’t trust our lives to the One who loves us perfectly.
We concern ourselves with worries and what ifs, and we close the door on these precious children who so desperately need someone to be willing to take the chance to love them.
We forget to look at God and what He can do if only we are willing to trust Him.
We can trust our Heavenly Father to make a way where there seems to be no way. We can trust Him to bring these children home and to provide the daily strength and resources we need to love and care for them once they get here. We can trust Him to bind our families together miraculously and beautifully in a way we never thought possible.
If you feel your heart stirred deep within you to bring precious Noah home, recognize it as God calling you to trust Him for a blessing beyond what you have experienced before.
Take a leap of faith and step out into the unknown and know that God will meet you there, amidst the insecurity and the impossibilities, and do the miraculous in your lives as well.
Nothing is impossible with God.
Isn’t it time our lives reflected His limitless power instead of our limitations?
A year ago I wrote a post entitled, Who Tells Their Stories? You can read it here.
It’s about our need as human beings, created in God’s image, to belong, to share a history together, and to reflect on the commonality and longevity of our experiences.
As I think of this dear boy who has so beautifully shared his desire to have a family, I think of that post I wrote, and I wonder, as the days of Noah’s life unfold, who will tell his story?
Blessings!
