The Miller Family
Nothing about our story is very typical. We had been riding the emotional roller coaster of trying unsuccessfully to start a family for several years, fighting to hold onto hope for a large family of our own, and having doctors tell us it probably wouldn’t happen. We both knew we wanted to add to our family through adoption at some point, but felt like God kept saying “wait.” Then, in September 2015, we saw a friend’s post on Facebook about a sibling group from Eastern Europe who needed a home. Our reaction went something like, “Oh how cute! But, yeah, that’s not happening.” It wasn’t that we didn’t believe that SOMEONE should provide them a home; we just knew it would just be really inconvenient for us. We struggled to get past the logistics required to make it all work. But something about these kids captured us. The more we prayed about it, the more we felt like God was saying this was the direction to go.
We didn’t know that in a ‘traditional adoption,’ you were supposed to have an idea of what kind of child you were looking for, do a home study, and then get matched with someone that fit your criteria. We just knew we wanted to try to adopt this sibling group. When we started the process, we had the initial $5,000 deposit required for our adoption agency and that was about it. But we took a step of faith and wrote a check.
We have had God open doors every step of the way so far. Our family has been completely on board and supportive. The agency approved us even though we hadn’t been married for five years yet (which is a prerequisite for the country we’re adopting from). This is the first year we’ve even made enough financially to qualify. At the same time, this process hasn’t been without its challenges. Our home study process took record lengths because we had to wait four months for our taxes to come back. Then our social worker left before the home study was finished and didn’t leave all her notes, so we had to redo all the background checks as well as a lot of the interview process. But after nine months, we finalized the home study and movedforward. Now, just before Christmas 2016, we are looking forward to bringing our children home sometime after the first of the year.
We both firmly believe that everyone deserves to have a family that loves them, even if it’s not always easy. But one of the things we have learned throughout this process is that we all have a story for our lives, or perhaps more truthfully, an expectation of what we think our story is going to look like. But sometimes, God just likes to expand our story beyond what we imagined so that He gets all the glory. That is definitely what He seems to be doing with our family.
-The Miller Family
