We are coming up on the 4 year anniversary of the Sunday in church when God first opened up my heart to adoption and I saw that as a real possibility to grow our family.

I’ll never forget how it felt like something completely washed over me from head to toe as I sat there in Sunday School and heard a friend say that her adopted son’s birth mother was pregnant again. My immediate reaction was, “I’d like to adopt that baby!”.

That shocked me, really, because I still believed God had a biological child for us.

As time went on though those adoption thoughts lingered and I decided to ask Dave what he thought about the option of adoption.

He wasn’t terribly open to the idea at first, but we both agreed that I should contact our friends from Sunday School who had adopted and ask to speak to them about the adoption process so that we could learn more about it.

January 10th we went over to their house and spent a couple of hours talking about adoption.

It is strange to me that there was a time in my life when adoption was a foreign concept to me!

We learned a whole lot that evening. Minutes after getting in our car to go home we both felt like if God opened the door to do an IVF cycle (we were waiting to find out if we would be approved for a grant to do an IVF cycle in early 2009), we would do IVF first and hopefully have one biological child and then we would adopt the rest of our children.

I chuckle at that now. It’s good to make plans, but we must leave room for God to reveal HIS PLANS to us.

After getting home that night, adoption was heavily on my mind. I remember I was sitting at the computer desk when a catchy little poem popped in my head. I jotted it down and then ended up typing it up on the computer, printing it out and placing it in a picture frame that had one word written along the bottom: Miracle.

Little did I know that God was about to do this exact miracle in my life and that poem was prophetic of what was to come!

It said: Our miracle has come, not in my womb but in our hearts! We are going to adopt. Baby (our last name) is on the way! She will be here in the month of May.

That was January 10th, 2009, and Little Bug was born in May of that year!

We had not even spoken with the adoption agency yet, but guess when Tracy first contacted the adoption agency?

December of 2008 – the exact month my heart was opened to adoption.

As life has moved on from my infertility days and even from the days when it seemed like we were always in the middle of some kind of adoption drama, I never want to forget the faithfulness of God during that season of my life.

Life is smooth sailing as far as infertility and adoption processes go. I am not bitter about my broken body and we do not plan to adopt again anytime soon or possibly ever. I can truly look back on that time in my life and see it as my past now.

But I never want to forget. I never want to forget the pain of infertility and what God did through my broken body.

He has restored everything. Yes, my reproductive organs are as useless as they were four years ago, but I am whole because through it all I have experienced first-hand two miracles and the faithfulness of God through it all.

- Elaine