Getting Started

My sweet friend, Julia, has been encouraging me to start this blog to record our "journey" to Zane! We are adopting this precious 2-year-old boy from ZhanJiang, China....hopefully within the next month! His Chinese name is Zhan Hai Chi, and we are going to call him Zane. ZhanJiang is on the southern coast of China, in Guangdong province, not too far from Hong Kong. It is actually pretty close to Vietnam. "Zhan" is the name given to all orphans in ZhanJiang's orphanage, and "Hai" is the middle name for all orphans in this orphanage found during 2007. So, "Chi" would be the name unique to our little one. Zane has a cleft lip (already repaired) and cleft palate (to be repaired). Because of his special needs, he has actually been with a foster family rather than living in the orphanage. We can't wait to meet him!!!!!

It has been a long road to this point, but not nearly so long as it could have been. We have seen the hand of God moving us to this particular place and time in our lives and can't help but praise Him for His goodness to us! I'm not the greatest at journaling, but we'll use this blog as a way of updating our friends and family of our journey while we are in China, as well as using it to archive Zane's story for him to read someday:)

First, a little about us: Monte is my amazing husband. I met him the summer I graduated from high school in 1994 (wow). I was on my youth group's "choir tour" to Jackson Hole, Wyoming (aka, the motherland according to Monte:) Long story short, he got my address from a little girl that I had become "pen-pals" with. We corresponded via snail mail for awhile, while I attended college at Samford in Birmingham, AL, and he finished up college in Alpine, TX. Eventually, we graduated from written letters to email and phone calls & he graduated college & moved to Wyoming to live out a young man's dream ministry job in a glorious part of the country. (I do have to say, in some ways email is our loss these days....I used to anticipate going to the mailboxes every day, hoping for a sweet letter from him - even though we were "just friends"! I still have every letter he wrote...but the emails are long gone, deleted in an old Samford email account somewhere). One day, we finally met in person again. I was convinced that God was going to let me meet him once more to get him "out of my system"....he couldn't possibly be as great as I was making him out to be! But alas, that was not to be & no other man has stood a chance ever since!!! Our feelings continued to grow over the years, and in 1997, he moved from beautiful Wyoming to the hot & humid South (it must be love!).

I used to feel almost guilty that he left what was an amazing place and time to come be with me. Even after we were married, it seemed like he was still "searching" or "waiting" for God to show him His plan. Monte had experienced such fulfillment in Wyoming, and when I graduated with my pharmacy degree & we moved to Asheville, NC for my residency, he was still searching for his place. A few years after we married, we felt God's leading for us to go to Kenya on a medical mission trip. Looking back, this trip was really pivotal for us. It solidified our heart for the world and showed me so much about faith & God's faithfulness. Monte also met a man named Dennis, who would eventually inspire my husband to go back to school to get additional training as a biomedical technician.

In the meantime, Monte and I began our journey to being parents:) We tried without medical intervention for about 3 years, then it was pretty clear we were going to need help. So, after another year of many appointments with doctors and specialists, surgery, and further fertility treatments, we came to a cross roads. We could go on with some very expensive treatments that were not guaranteed, or we could adopt.

A few things happened that brought us to the mutual decision to adopt. A friend of mine from work made a statement one day that really stuck with me. She said that raising children was so much more about passing on our values than about passing on our DNA. As that truth really became a part of me, it was easier to see the beauty of adoption as the gift that it is. I was ready to get off the fertility train and look further into adoption.

The event that was the turning point for Monte could have been seen by some as a tragedy, but Monte saw God's divine providence so clearly that he embraced adoption for our family. Some friends of ours adopted a little girl from Guatemala. Soon after she arrived here, they realized that she was deaf. While this could be seen as a hard thing for this family, Monte knew them, and knew that God had brought this precious one to them specifically because he knew they would be amazing parents for this little girl. (And of course they are!! They quickly and miraculously received grant money and she now has cochlear implants and can hear! God is so good!)

By this time, Monte had completed his studies, and amazingly a position came open at Samaritan's Purse offering him the opportunity to use his new skills all over the world! So, we moved to Lenoir, NC, and Monte works in a ministry where he is passionate about his work and he is able to see the difference that his job makes for people in developing countries. So, my precious husband is no longer "searching"....he has found that "nitch" after all the interim years of waiting and preparing. What a joy to see!

While I was incredibly happy for my husband, I was not immediately enthralled with moving to the small town of Lenoir. I loved Asheville. I loved my friends and had a great job. It was hard to leave. Even after moving to Lenoir, I kept commuting back to Asheville for several months to work (and to do fertility treatments). That could not last, of course, but about the same time we let go of the "dream" of conceiving....God also brought me to a crossroads with my job in Asheville. I decided to let it go as well. Once that happened, it was like all the unknown pieces just started falling into place. I happened to meet the CFO and CEO of the hospital here in Lenoir that next Sunday at church, and within a week had a position at the hospital not 5 minutes from our home. We started making friends here in Lenoir, and getting involved in our new church.

What has been really amazing is the mix of people that God has brought into our life here in this small town. Even though I worked in a hospital in Asheville, I wouldn't say that we had many personal, spiritual connections with many people in the medical field. Here, we have friends in our church who include speech therapists, teachers of special needs children, our family physician, and believe it or not, even an ENT surgeon. It's like God handpicked the people around us that could best support us and our son, Zane. God has already used each one of them, along with many others, to encourage us in our wait for Zane and help us see that God is sovereign and will be with us every step of the way in his young life -- we're learning first hand that it's not all about us & our desire to control our circumstances. God is much better at doing that than we are!
Our Adoption Photo by Mark Moore (www.markmoorephotography.com)